Mass Deacidification - Adoption and Costs

Adoption and Costs

While deacidification has been adopted by major research libraries such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, it is not clear that many archives, particularly those in the United States, have followed suit. Whereas some European national archives have tested deacidification techniques, the United States’ National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which pioneered an aqueous technique that improved upon Barrow’s, has chosen to invest its preservation dollars elsewhere. In 2000, the Chief of the NARA Document Conservation Laboratory defended the lack of a mass deacidification program by pointing to differences between library and archival collections, for example noting that many of the papers coming to NARA were of a higher quality than those in library collections; that the Archives does not receive records from Federal government agencies until they are at least 30 years old, by which time acidic paper will have already been irrevocably weakened; and that limited resources might best be applied elsewhere, such as climate control, as under the Archives' Twenty-Year Preservation Plan, the emphasis was on "maximum benefit for the greatest number of records."

Though now dated, several sources estimate the costs and suitability of deacidification treatment. Studies conducted by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and the General State Archive of the Netherlands found the DEZ method, properly used, might be particularly applicable to archival materials. It was estimated that deacidification costs, excluding transportation and handling, during the early 1990s was $5–10 per volume. During 1995-1997, the Library of Congress received $2 million in appropriations to deacidify 72,000 books using the Bookkeeper commercial method and evaluate alternative methods. The actual cost per book was $11.70. Finally, a recent cost comparison with reformatting options per volume yielded $125 for microfilming, $50 for scanning and minimal indexing, and, based on a New York Public Library project, $16.20 for deacidification.