Research on the Conservation of Paper and Books and New Techniques for Evaluating Paper Deterioration

Abstract

In March 1998, Kyocera Co., Ltd. donated approximately 13,000 volumes of British Parliamentary Papers dating from 1801 to 1986 to the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan. Examination of some of the Papers, however, was either very diffi cult or impossible because of the fragility of the paper. The National Museum of Ethnology, in collaboration with other institutions, decided to conduct a study on ways of evaluating paper deterioration and on strengthening degraded papers. In this paper, a new evaluation method for paper deterioration tentatively called the “rolling test” is described. The paper to be tested is rolled using cylinders of different diameters, and paper that can be safely rolled on cylinders of smaller diameters is considered to be more “fl exible”. The correlation between the rolling test and time of artifi cial ageing was studied using acidic wood free papers (dated 1981) artifi cially aged at 105 ± 2°C for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 20, 24, 26, 28 and 32 weeks. The relationship between conventional mechanical measurements (tearing strength, folding endurance, tensile strength, and zero-span tensile strength) and the rolling test was evaluated using the same paper samples. These preliminary tests suggest that the rolling test permits the evaluation of paper samples that are too weak to be properly measured by ordinary mechanical measurements. The application of the rolling test to the Kyocera Collection of British Parliamentary Papers is also described.