>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> It's now the noon hour, which means it's time to hear
about photos, how to preserve your digital and non-digital photos.
And to talk with us about that we have Dana Hemmenway and Phil Michel,
and Dana will be leading off.   >> Dana Hemmenway: Good afternoon.
I represent the non-digital camp of this section talking
about photographs, and primarily I'm going to be speaking to you
about the preservation and care of photographs.
We all know what photographs are, right?
Most of us have masses of snapshots of our family,
friends and important events.
There are historic events, portraits, landscapes,
documentary photography, snapshots, photographs used for legal purposes,
and fine art photographs.
Photographs are a very important part of our Nation's collections
in museums and libraries and archives,
as well as valuable family records.
Believe it or not, photographs are very fragile items
and need special care and attention,
whether they are a precious family image,
or the majestic landscape prints by photographer Ansel Adams.
Their physical structure and material composition are complex.
Each of the materials in this unique object have their own
particular needs.
Learning about these features will significantly improve the
preservation strategies for a collection of one or many.
In this short presentation on photographs, I will discuss some
of the materials that photographs are made of,
common causes of deterioration and strategies for the stabilization
and prevention of future damage.
Since its invention in 1840, photography has gone through many,
many changes using many different materials and techniques.
Here are just a few of the process names.
To understand photographs, it's helpful to break the structure
down into its basic features, and this is best seen
through a schematic drawing of a cross section.
Most photographs are composed of several layers.
This typically consists of a support,
a binder, and image material.
It is the choice of these materials in combination
that produce what we know as a photograph.
First, there is the support,
the material that provides the surface on which the image lies.
The most common form of support is paper for a print; however,
in the early days of photography, many photographs were made
on rigid supports such as sheets of iron, as in this tintype
on the right, silver-plated copper, or glass.
Various plastics have been used since the 19th century as a support
for negatives or transparencies, or motion picture film, as we've heard.
The material from which the image is rendered gives us the tones
from lights to darks.
The monotone prints we are most familiar
with use very finely divided particles of silver.
Other metals can be used, such as platinum on the left,
and iron complexes are used to produce the cyanotype,
the blue picture on the right.
Three separate organic died layers, cyan, magenta and yellow,
are used to produce most color prints and negatives.
Most photographs additionally have a binder, a transparent medium,
also known as an emulsion, that's suspends or holds the image material
above the support layer, and often gelatin is the emulsion
that we are most familiar with, but there are others.
There are a broad range of things that can cause harm to photographs.
Basically, we can separate them into three categories: mechanical damage,
chemical deterioration and biological attack.
Physical damage can be the result of rough or inappropriate handling.
Other manifestations of mechanic damage appear as tears,
creases, and delamination.
Chemical deterioration can affect the image or support layer.
This example shows discoloration and fading of the silver image material
that is the result of improper fixing at the time of manufacturing.
Film supports, like acetate and nitrate film negatives
as we have heard, are inherently unstable
and will deteriorate with time.
Bad environmental conditions can also cause image fading,
or a phenomenon called silver mirroring,
in the image in the center.
The organic dyes in color photographs can undergo chemical
changes that result in fading or dramatic shifts in color.
We add materials to photographs to reinforce and mend or house,
but not all of these materials are benign.
The wrong choice can result in staining or fading.
On the upper right is a wood backing board that was used
to as a support placed directly behind a photograph.
Note the brown staining pattern that mimics the wood grain.
That's the stain pattern on the back of the photograph itself.
Pressure sensitive tapes and adhesives, like rubber cement,
can permanently stain an image or paper support.
Much of photography is comprised of organic materials, such as paper
and gelatin, and these are subject to biological attack.
Mold can stain paper and gelatin, and rodents
and insects can take a bite out of a photograph
if it looks particularly tasty.
Promoting the proper environment, handling and storage
of valuable items will have a long lasting positive effect
on the preservation of a collection or single item.
Perhaps the most important influence
on photograph preservation is the control
of temperature and relative humidity.
High temperature raises rates of deterioration causing papers
to become brittle and some binders to yellow.
High relative humidity provides the moisture necessary
for harmful chemical reactions and leads to silver mirroring,
and image fading and physical distortion.
Particulates like soot and ash exist in abundance outdoors and can come
in through heating or cooling ducts, doors, and windows.
Pollution produced by fossil fuels, combustion of car engines,
and ozone, oxidizes silver image material turning it from a brown
or black to an orangey-yellow color as shown in the perimeter
of the photograph on the left.   On the right is a small image;
the lighter area is an area that's been cleaned
to show you how much accumulated dust and dirt there is
on this particular photograph.
Light is a well-known culprit in the deterioration of historic materials.
Light is a form of energy, and most deterioration
from light can be attributed to ultraviolet rays.
The most important thing to know about light is
that the damage is cumulative and irreversible.
When photographs are placed on display, avoid direct sunlight.
If possible, rotate items that are on display.
This will prolong the exhibition life of the individual photograph.
Employ a special ultraviolet filtering Plexiglas.
For valuable items, it's possible to make digital copies or surrogates.
You can put these on display and keep, and protect the original
for future generations to enjoy.
As we've already seen, materials that come in direct contact
with photographs have a significant impact
on their physical and chemical condition.
This includes sleeves, adhesives, tapes, clips,
mounts or matting materials,
and this also applies to storage containers.
The key is to provide multiple layers or layers of protection.
Ideally, photographs should be individually sleeved
to increase protection from handling, damage, abrasion, dust,
dirt, and harmful oxidative gases in the air.
Your basic choice is between paper and plastic.
In many cases, it's not practical to sleeve each and every item,
but that's what we shoot for.
You can keep and store multiple items in folders.
Folders provide protection, as well as support
for individual or groups of items.
And slumping, as you see in the upper left,
can be avoided with adequate support.
Boxes provide additional protection from exposure to dirt and pollution
by creating a physical, as well as a chemical barrier.
Vertical or horizontal storage is determined largely
by size and condition.
Exhibition items are generally furnished with a window mat.
The print is attached to the backboard using photo corners.
Photo corners are preferred because they avoid the need
to attach anything directly to the photograph itself.
Though much attention has been given here to the proper environmental
and physical storage of photographs,
it is when the material is being handled
that it's at its greatest risk.
A photograph that has rested in archival storage
for decades may be damaged irreparably in one careless moment,
simple human mistakes that are no one's fault, they just happen.
Here are some basic guidelines to help you with handling photographs.
Don't force or bend the photograph in or out of a sleeve
because you can break or crack the emulsion and paper support.
And whenever possible, use a support to carry photographs,
especially ones with brittle mounts.
Use pencils when working near or marking the back of a print.
As you can see on the print on the left, someone used an ink pen
on the verso on the backside,
and now it has permanently faded the silver image in that exact wording.
So use pencils when working or near or marking the back of the print.
Inks can stain, as well as fade image material.
And graphite is easier for remove.
Handle prints one at a time, but use two hands to support.
Stack items carefully, smaller ones on top of larger ones.
Avoid post-it notes, self-adhesive tape, staples,
paperclips and rubber bands.
Photographs are easily disfigured by fingerprints, so use clean gloves
or very clean gloves, but do not touch the surface of the photograph.
Thank you for your attention.   I'm happy to answer any questions.
I'm at the photo table in the back, and I have samples,
as well as other illustrations of deterioration and handling.
Next -- thank you.
[Applause] Next up is Phil Michel.   >> Phil Michel: Welcome, everyone.
What I'd really like to do today is inspire you to act
and inspire you a little bit with awareness.
A lot of what you will hear about at the various tables today is really
about just taking action, making copies,
understanding what you've got and documenting.
All right, so how many of you have digital cameras, digital cellphones.
Is anybody just shooting film anymore, nothing but film?
Yay, one. So hopefully the film photographer here still has
good tips.   Okay, so what happens.
Everyone is shooting digital photographs,
it's getting very convenient, it's easy.
Pixels are cheap.
You know, I don't have to keep buying film for my camera.
All right, everyone say cheese.
Great, okay now, so what happens now.
I've got a digital photo,
and not all of you are smiling, I'm sorry to say.
But it's a nice picture.   I want to keep this.
This is a nice day, it's a great event, okay.
File name on this photo I've got is 100-2756.
I don't think I'm going to be able to remember you by that number,
so I may wish to take this digital photo, take my memory card
out at home, copy these files onto my home computer,
and give them some names that I can understand what's going on.
It's ALA Preservation Week, and welcome to the Library of Congress.
I may want to describe my photos that way.
The camera I used just now is a pretty high-end camera,
it's a Canon.
I shot in a format that's known colloquially as RAW,
but more specifically, there's a camera RAW format known only
to Canon and Canon software.
So when I go home, I'm either going to have to use my Canon software
to really process and handle this image the way I want.
But that might not be very useful if I want to send this file to my mom
to let her know that I actually went to work today.
I may want to convert this photo to a format that's a lot more open
and accessible to her and her software, so thinking about formats
and how you can share photos and make them last
for a long time is a very important thing to do.
Know how your images can work for you
and for your friends, and as your sharing.
Okay, so I have my new fancy Smartphone,
and I'm still learning how to use, but it has a camera, as well.
So I'm going to make you say cheese, again.
Everybody.   Good, okay, you're all blurry.
Now this photo, this is a fun day.   This is a very convenient device.
I'm going to go back and join Dana at our table later and talk more
about digital photos with you, but I'm also going to upload this
to my Facebook page, okay.   Well, that's good, I've made a copy.
It's no longer just on cellphone, all right, so that's a good thing.
But what about Facebook, is that a good place
to keep my photos for the long term?   I don't know, maybe, I don't know.
Have you ever tried to get your photos back off of Facebook?
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe even before I send it, I'll give it the exact same caption
that I'm giving this other photo.
This is ALA Preservation Week, and I'll send it up to Facebook.
When it gets there, though, it may not have the same file name,
and how will I organize it, and how will I remember two years from now
after I've done thousands of other Facebook posts,
where's that picture, where I am going to find it.
Okay. So I'm just going to go over briefly --
we have some handouts at our table with some just major points
about getting organized and thinking about what you need to remember
when you're doing -- when you're organizing your digital
photo collection.
And we can talk specifics about software
and cameras if you'd like later.
Okay, so, again, these are just simple tasks.
Identify where you have your digital photos, okay.
I'm going to copy some onto my main computer at home.
I'm going to tell my wife and kids about it so that they know
where I'm storing photos should something happen to me.
I'm going to make a list and keep it somewhere
where I know I can find it later with all my other important papers,
all my financial documents.
These are important memories for me and my family.
Decide which photos are important to you.
Okay, as I said, pixels are cheap, it's very easy to shoot lots
and lots of digital photos, but they really pile
up when you start pouring them on your hard drive at home.
You know, maybe you don't have to keep them all, be selective.
Decide which ones are most important to you,
the ones that you do have time to take, take care of paying attention
to and making last for yourself.   Get organized, okay.
There's a lot of different ways people try
to organize their digital photo collections.
They like to pour them all in one folder on their computer
and name the files based on who's in the picture, et cetera; that's fine.
I like to organize my photos by date, so I have a folder
that says 2010, and in there there'll be a sub-folder
that says May, and then I'll make another sub-folder in there
that talks about Preservation Week, and I'll put all my photos in there.
If I stay consistent with that approach,
then that's something I can understand and always find later,
and the people who may have to go and find my images
in the future can find and understand.
So get organized and stick with a system
that works for you, and go with it.
Scattering a lot of different systems in a lot
of different places can be very confusing.
Again, making copies.
A lot of people will talk to you today about how you make copies
of your digital collections and where to store them.
We recently worked with a group of professional photographers
that learned that their colleagues weren't doing a very good job
at making backups.
So they developed a simple rule: three, two, one.
Make three copies, have at least two of them on two different types media
so that if something about these memory cards aren't supported
in the future, maybe I can use a portable hard drive,
so two different medium.
And keep one copy in a different location from where you live, okay.
You never know, floods, fires, natural disasters happen.
My computer at home, the desk it was sitting on,
completely collapsed last month.
The entire computer crashed on the floor.
Fortunately, I was able to save the hard drive,
but I did lose a few disks.   I did have a portable hard drive
at my brother's house down the street, though.
Now where it gets really complex is in software
and managing the digital files.
For any of you, all of you who have digital camera, probably what came
with that digital camera is some software that you loaded
on your computer, and it has its own methodology and means
for helping you organize your photos and label them and catalog them
and put dates and make nice albums, slide shows, et cetera.
It's good to understand and read about your software
about how those images and all those interactions you're having
with your images can translate to other places, okay.
For example, some software lets you do lots of different types
of tagging and labeling and dating, and it's saving all
that information, but only inside that software.
If I take my copy of that digital photo that I was cataloging
in one place and I put it on my hard drive and open it
up at my brother's house, he may not see all of those tags and all
of those dates, and all of those captions
that I worked so hard to take care of.
So try and learn and understand how you can maintain all
of that information with your photos,
or copy them out to other places so that you can still have it.
You don't want to be locked into any one particular system
that you're using.
Organizing your photos on the Web is great convenience for sharing,
and we know social media has really taken a boom --
Facebook is just a wonderful popularity site
for putting your photos.
It's really the same principle there.
Understand what you're doing and how you are organizing your photos
in these places, and what in there is helping you accomplish
preservation and what is not.
What you have done in posting your photos
at those sites is made another copy.   That's great.
But again, all of those social interactions you may have in sharing
with friends and tagging photos may not necessarily survive
if Facebook is no longer popular two or three years from now and we move
onto the next best thing.
We have, at the table if you visit me later, I have a reference
to a website that lists lots of different sharing
and photo cataloging software programs and websites
and the advantages and disadvantages of each,
and we can talk a little more in detail what those can do for you.
File format, I mentioned briefly, again, that this fancy camera saves
in a format that only works really well with my Canon software,
but it may be not be a software that I can handle
in other popular picture handling programs.
So amongst the most popular wide-open formats
for digital photography are JPEG,
which most of you are probably familiar with, and TIF,
which is tagged image file format, and that saves a lot of image data
in a very unprocessed and easily preserved state.
It's a very common format.
Almost all photo handling software programs can use the TIF format,
and it's an open standard.
It's not tied with any one company, so it has advantages for that.
And the last point I want to bring up is talking
about embedding metadata, okay.   What is metadata?
Metadata are those dates, those captions, those tags, key words,
anything you are associating with your digital photos
that you're typing out or writing or wanting to preserve
with that digital photo counts as metadata, okay.
And it's the metadata most people care about.
It's what's helping you tell you what you've got
and what you've saved.
There's a lot of, more and more programs are being helpful
at embedding that information inside of those files for you
so that you can carry those formats to other places.
It's often in high -- supported in very high-end software,
like Photoshop, but we're hoping more and more camera manufacturers
and digital photo software will start looking for it.
So whenever you read about metadata and how to preserve it and how
to embed it when you're learning about your digital cameras
and your digital software, that's a good thing, seek it out
and it will help you, okay.   Thanks everyone for your time.
Again, and if you have more in-depth questions, please visit us
at the photo table over here.   [Applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.