IPI receives grant for digital print preservation project

RIT's Image Permanence Institute Awarded Major Grant to Study
Digital Print Preservation

IPI receives $314,215 grant from Institute of Museum and Library
Services

The Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology
has received funding from the Institute of Museum and Library
Services (IMLS) for a major research and development project dealing
with the preservation of digitally printed materials.

Inkjet, electrophotographic, and dye diffusion thermal transfer
materials account for the overwhelming majority of desktop documents
and an increasing number of short-run publications and monographs in
institutional collections today. Collection care professionals need
guidance-first, to determine which objects in their collections have
been digitally printed and, second, to understand the nature and
preservation needs of such materials.

   "Virtually all forms of individual scholarly communication and
    artistic image creation now depend on only a few technologies
    for producing hard-copy output,"

says James Reilly, Director of RIT's Image Permanence Institute.

   "Because these technologies haven't been systematically studied,
    a balanced overview of their strengths and weaknesses from the
    point of view of collection preservation doesn't exist. We have
    already observed that the newer media are vulnerable to damage
    in ways that photographic materials or output from older text
    recording systems were not. We can't assume that what is good
    for traditional materials will be good for digital materials."

The IMLS funds will support a two-year study of the potentially
harmful effects of enclosures and physical handling on digital
prints, as well as their vulnerability to damage due to flood.

Project results will be published on a unique Web site, The DP3
Project: Digital Print Preservation Portal. The site will contain
information and tools to aid in the identification of digital prints
and in understanding their chemical and physical nature; it will
offer scientifically sound recommendations for storage, display and
handling; and it will guide users in assessing the risk of damage to
these materials in the event of flood so that they might revise
their institutional disaster response plans.

The Image Permanence Institute (IPI), part of RIT's College of
Imaging Arts and Sciences, is a university based, non-profit
research laboratory devoted to scientific research in the
preservation of visual and other forms of recorded information. It's
the world's largest independent laboratory with this specific scope.


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:33
                Distributed: Wednesday, December 5, 2007
                       Message Id: cdl-21-33-002
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