Damage function for historic paper. Part II: Wear and tear

Strlič, Matija, Grossi Sampedro, Carlota M., Dillon, Catherine, Bell, Nancy, Fouseki, Kalliopi, Brimblecombe, Peter, Menart, Eva, Ntanos, Kostas, Lindsay, William, Thickett, David, France, Fenella and De Bruin, Gerrit (2015) Damage function for historic paper. Part II: Wear and tear. Heritage Science, 3. ISSN 2050-7445

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Abstract

Background: As a result of use of library and archival documents, defined as reading with handling in the context of general access, mechanical degradation (wear and tear) accumulates. In contrast to chemical degradation of paper, the accumulation of wear and tear is less well studied. Previous work explored the threshold of mechanical degradation at which a paper document is no longer considered to be fit for the purpose of use by a reader, while in this paper we explore the rate of accumulation of such damage in the context of object handling. Results: The degree of polymerisation (DP) of historic paper of European origin from mid-19th–mid-20th Century was shown to affect the rate of accumulation of wear and tear. While at DP > 800, this accumulation no longer depends on the number of handlings (the process is random), a wear-out function could be developed for documents with DP between 300 and 800. For objects with DP < 300, one large missing piece (i.e. such that contains text) developed on average with each instance of handling, which is why we propose this DP value as a threshold value for safe handling. Conclusions: The developed model of accumulation of large missing pieces per number of handlings of a document depending on DP, enables us to calculate the time required for an object to become unfit for use by readers in the context of general access. In the context of the average frequency of document use at The UK National Archives (Kew), this period is 60 years for the category of papers with DP 300, and 450 years for papers with DP 500. At higher DP values, this period of time increases beyond the long-term planning horizon of 500 years, leading to the conclusion that for such papers, accumulation of wear and tear is not a significant collection management concern.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2015 Strlič et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	heritage management,conservation,fitness for use,wear and tear,mechanical properties,reliability engineering
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Health Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Health Promotion
Related URLs:	http://www.heritagesciencejournal.com/co...
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2016 00:06
Last Modified:	27 Jan 2024 02:52
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/59818
DOI:	10.1186/s40494-015-0065-y

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