Paper from Collections Demography published by Heritage Science

The most recent paper to emerge from the Collections Demography project (funded by the AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme) has been published by the peer-reviewed journal Heritage Science. 

The paper entitled ‘Damage function for historic paper. Part 1: Fitness for Use’ explores the question: ‘when do archival and library documents used for display, or reading by the public, become unfit for such use?’ This was examined in relation to the values given to the documents by the general public. It was shown that in general, documents become unfit when text is evidently missing. However, if the visitor or reader assigns historic value to a document, then change in condition has little impact on the fitness for use.

Read the paper here.