Degradation products from naturally aged paper leaves of a 16th-century-printed book: a spectrochemical study.

In this work, we present a wide-range spectrochemical analysis of the degradation products from naturally aged paper. The samples obtained from wash waters used during the de-acidification treatment of leaves from a 16th-century-printed book were analysed through NMR, IR, Raman UV/Vis, EPR and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy and HPLC-MS and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) analysis. By these methods we also studied some of the previous samples treated by acidification (sample AP) and catalytic hydrogenation (sample HP).

Chemical and physical analysis for the improvement of the dry mounting method for fragile documents.

Paper lamination is a widely used method to consolidate fragile documents. Previous studies have presented a new method of lamination that allows the consolidation of documents before undertaking aqueous treatments. In this method a thin Japanese paper coated with an acrylic resin is applied on the fragile document by means of a heated press.

Lamination of fragile documents as preliminary intervention to aqueous mass deacidification. A study on reversibility effects.

Paper lamination is a widely known method to consolidate fragile and brittle documents. Since the loss of mechanical strength of paper documents is almost completely due to their acidity, the procedure generally adopted by restorers consists of an aqueous treatment of deacidification followed by consolidation. The drawback of this method is due to the loss of paper fragments during the deacidification step, that must be therefore accurately controlled.