Join Lochie Daddo and Caroline Whitley (The Australian National Maritime Museum's Paper & Photographic Materials Conservator) as they offer professional tips of the trade in the preservation of your most important memories - your family photo album. Filmed on location in the small object store at the National Maritime Museum on Sydney Harbour.
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Australian National Maritime Museum
Australians are closely linked to the sea through commerce, defence, exploration, adventure, sport and play. Our oceans and waterways have influenced our development, and who we are. The museum captures these themes with fascinating artifacts, lively exhibitions, exhibition programs, fun activities, and even the chance to board ships and experience life on the water.
www.anmm.gov.au
The National Archives of Australia is a great additional source of information with leads and useful links regarding care of family records such as photographs, paper items, scrapbooks and digital preservation.
www.naa.gov.au/collection/fami...
Video Transcript
Hey, Lochie Daddo here from the National Maritime Museum here in Sydney. Now if your family's anything like mine you've got plenty of old photos stored up. But if you're anything like me then they're probably stored in a mouldy old shoe box at the back of the garage right next to that sit up machine that you've never used. But at some point you may want to treat them with a little TLC to ensure their chances of survival are strong. Let's meet photographic conservator Caroline Whitley and get some tips.
My position is the Senior Conservator of Paper and Photographic Materials so it's my job to basically care for all the paper based items.
So you're the girl to talk to about how to care for our photos. What would you say are your top tips for taking care of old photographs?
Okay well basically make sure that they're being stored in the most stable environment in your house. Away from exterior walls so that the temperature and humidity are as constant as possible and for photographs generally as cool as possible.
And what are the things that we should watch out for?
Well in terms of how you may have already been storing photographs, an album like this one is called a magnetic album, a self-adhesive one.
Which we all did.
That was it, which we all did and they were very popular from about the 60s or 70s on but if they haven't been stored in a good location they can really have degraded by this time which means that the photographs are going to be impossible to take out, potentially.
Yes, so what do we do in that situation?
If you do have these magnetic albums I would say spend the money to change to higher quality archival albums or nonacidic albums.
Yes.
Which is usually written on the front cover.
And everything's digital now. Is there a way we can bring our old photos into the present and save them for the future, going down that track too?
Yes there is. I would always say keep your originals, get them digitised, scan them yourself and try and save them to at least a couple of different sources.
What are you doing with this one here?
They're both great examples of photographs that have been damaged by water, just damaged by the very poor quality materials that the backing boards and the window mats have been made from, and we've got insect damage. If these were mine I would be keeping them like this but just storing them in a good archival quality album.
Caroline, what's the best way to handle old photographs?
Never actually touch the photographs because our skin has oils that come out of it and once you've put a fingerprint on that photograph into what's called the gelatine emulsion layer it's there for life basically, and it is acidic so over time and bad storage conditions it can work its way in. So always, even if a photo is like this, hold it by its edge.
Hands off.
Hands off.
Well Caroline's now set me on the right path. I do now know how to take care of my photos. There's a couple of things that we need to do: Firstly take them out of those old magnetic albums as soon as you can. The second tip is to always only touch the original pictures by the edges. Third one is to store your photos, the original photos, in the most stable part of your home and probably the most important one is to digitise the original photos and keep copies.