The Epic of the Archival Repair Tape and the Torn Newspaper.

A blog about how a librarian and her intern piece together a piece of decades old history.

The newspaper article, which a current student had donated to the school, was an article from 1976 and was brought to the school in a zip-lock plastic bag. The issue with this is that newspapers printed from the mid 1800’s through today have been printed on wood pulp paper which is known to be acidic. Thus, when the article was carefully removed from the bag, it was already falling apart and in fact, had simply divided into two pieces.

It should be noted that while some archival websites instruct to store newspapers in poly bags, others suggest that these poly bags and sleeves should not be used for a few different reasons with one reason focusing on the concern that enclosing the newspapers can cause the acidity to increase at an accelerated rate.

The next step in our restoration process began by careful handling and the

use of gloves as we placed the pieces on an open buffered folder and then cautiously examined the article to determine a plan of action.

We decided to repair small sections of each piece before attempting to piece the halves back as one. This process was slow and precise as the paper was extremely brittle due to the nature of newspaper. We even used a metal tool known as a micro spatula which has an extremely thin end, to carefully unfold and flatten any sections that could not be unfolded with our gloved fingers. The next step was to repair the tears that were larger and easier to unfold and lay flat. The tape that we used was a pH neutral acrylic adhesive tape known as document repair tape. Once the tape was carefully applied, it was burnish with the bone folder, as recommended per the directions. This step was repeated over and over, as we carefully decided which tear we would repair next.*

We realized that to us; this thirty-nine-year-old newspaper was being cared for as if we were working on the original Declaration of Independence. As far as we were concerned, it as a document that was part of the history of the school, and we were going to do what was needed, to restore and archive this article.

*This will be an ongoing project as it is extremely time consuming.

The Epic of the Archival Repair Tape and the Torn Newspaper.