Museum Artifacts In Danger Of Disintegrating

Jan. 17 - KGO (KGO) -- There are millions of rare artifacts in the nation's museums and libraries, but a lack of proper care is causing many of those items to disintegrate and vanish forever.

At the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum you'll find artifacts that have survived world wars, but may not survive the battle against time.

James Kern, Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum: "We've had thousands of items donated over the years& it's everything from paper, to textiles, to metal objects. to wood furniture and they all have different kinds of conservation needs."

That's a challenge being faced by more than 30,000 museums and libraries in the United States entrusted with nearly five billion artifacts detailing the human story.

Kristen Laise, Heritage Preservation: "Without some kind of effort at the level of individual institutions, and within communities and within states and within our nation we run the risk of losing these items forever."

Kristen Laise is with Heritage Preservation, a Washington D.C. based non-profit that commissioned a report to determine the health of America's museum and library collections. The report found that 80 percent of institutions do not have an emergency plan to protect their collections in the event of natural or man-made disaster. There are 190 million items that need immediate help or run the risk of being lost forever.

Dr. Charles Faulhabert, director, Bancroft Library: "If these things are not kept under optimal conditions of temperature and humidity, they will disintegrate."

That's one of the reasons preservationists at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library have been working to copy and restore as many artifacts as possible. The collection includes more than 44 million pages of manuscripts, some dating back more than 2,000 years.

Barclay Ogden, head, Preservation Dept.: "Berkeley has been very lucky and very wise in having saw a need for a preservation program for the collection, and has had a program in place for the last 25 years."

Barclay Ogden oversees the program that includes the photographing of thousands of pages of old newspapers and storing them on microfilm, the restoration of thousands of books and digitally recording the most delicate documents so that they can be accessed without further damaging the original.

But that doesn't make those originals obsolete.

"Unless we've got this kind of tactile information, unless we know where the paper was made and when it was made, we have no way of putting this document into its historical context."

So far only about one percent of the university's collection has been copied. The process is time consuming and requires the staff to manage the process. For smaller museums, the money to fund archiving just isn't there, but the need still is.

James Kern: "It's critical really, especially for smaller museums because most museums in America are smaller museums and they preserve the history of communities and that's really the history of everyday people."