Permanence/Durability and Preservation Research at the Barrow Laboratory

Abstract

The work of William J. Barrow and his laboratory spanned more than forty years. His methods made acetate lamination of deteriorated documents practical and useful. He did much to spread the understanding that acidity is the major cause of paper deterioration, and his deacidification processes are in wide use. Commercial production of permanent/durable paper was begun in 1959 and eight such papers were available in 1973. An average activation energy of 25.3 kcal/mol was determined for the loss of folding endurance and tear resistance. 1470 book papers from the period 1507-1949 were studied. Moist accelerated aging is faster than dry oven aging but not necessarily more like natural aging. A bulk morpholine treatment process for bound books raises the pH of acid papers and prolongs their useful life by a factor of 4-5. The Barrow Laboratory closed in 1977.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.