Studies on Germicidal Benefit of Ultra Violet Ray upon Old Paper Documents

Abstract

In the ever-changing world, cultural heritage, especially through documents, plays an important role in a civilized developing country. The documents specially made of paper are organic products and more prone to bacterial formation. From most of the heritage archives, it has been informed/ observed that bacteria destroys the important documents. The conservations of these articles are essential. From the point of view for good lighting system design, one can utilize a photobiological effect of light, i.e., UV range of the light source is killing bacteria too. Experimentation has been carried out on different paper documents with different intensities of UV contents from light sources. The bacteria content in a sample at the initial stage as well as after UV treatments with different intensities have been noted, analyzed, and furnished in this paper. The process shows a successful result as per expectation. If this methodology can be implemented for the conservation of paper archives, it will give a fruitful result for the conservation of our cultural heritage, which is very much valuable for the development of a society.