Restoration of wet books
restoration of archives, papers and documents
Prodoc corroborates Edam’s twenty-year experience by specializing in the restoration and recovery of paper material.
Ours is a rigorous and compliant approach that involves the use of professional restorers and modern technologies in order to provide a high level service to take care of the precious assets that are preserved in archives, libraries, museums and administrations.
The restoration of ancient books, documents and archival and paper assets includes various activities: the rescue, drying, clean up and recovery of assets affected by accidental events.
Direct interventions on cultural heritage are carried out under the supervision of a Restorer of Cultural Heritage pursuant to art. 9 bis of the Codice dei Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio and in line with the provisions of Article 29 of the aforementioned code (d.lgs. 42 of January 22, 2004).
Following an exceptional event, we prepare the safety measures by activating our staff to collect the affected material.
We deal with the management of major disasters but with the attention of those who are used to work on unique works.
We look for and manage relationships with refrigeration warehouses throughout the country that comply with the safety and temperature standards required by the competent superintendencies.
In our laboratory we then dedicate ourselves to the drying through freeze-drying of the material. We deal with archival documents, ancient, modern and contemporary books and prints.
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We stabilize the paper
The deteriorating action of molds, mechanical damage and tears make the paper brittle.
These phenomena often recur and are co-present in ancient documents and books present in historical archives, libraries and museums.
These conditions can lead to the loss of information or the destruction of the entire object. Prodoc offers various paper stabilization processes according to the condition of the individual objects. With all these procedures we restore its usability.
Paper stabilization through the addition of fibers for minor damage.
During the addition of fibers, we add cellulose fibers that have been previously softened in a water bath.
We wash this pulp on a sieve with a production process similar to that used for making paper. Fibers accumulate on imperfections and edges giving documents and pages a new stability, making them usable again and ensuring the preservation of the information they contain.
Paper stabilization through lamination for badly damaged documents and books.
Heavily degraded and fragile documents require holistic stabilization. To do this, we glue thin Japanese paper with traditional flat laminate stickers to the fragile sheet. The stabilizing paper protects the paper from further loss. We embed even more damaged paper by laminating it on both sides with Japanese paper in a stabilizing composite.
The restoration process
The restoration involves the execution of direct activities in order to restore the integrity of the property, such as:
Collection of archival assets damaged after cataloging.
Salvage activities to limit the further deterioration of the document.
Transfer of the material to our laboratory.
Restoration of the damaged material
In the case of wet books, the following activities are carried out:
Freezing of paper materials to stop their deterioration.
Drying through freeze-drying process.
Flattening and replacement of the documents in folders or containers for storage.