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Re: Another Old Photocopy question



This brings to mind a request from a colleague lately regarding the
collection of Otis R. Marston, held in the Huntington Library in San
Marino, California.  The Marston collection is an absolute must for
anyone conducting research on the Colorado River.  Marston
collected, by fair means and foul, literally everything he could on
anyone who had ever traveled down the Colorado.  Unfortunately,
he copied documents on what was called, I think, Thermofax; blue
and brown copies on slick paper.  Just recently the colleague
returned from working in the Marston papers and said "we've got to
find some way to copy those thing onto archival paper!"  Apparently
they are fading; to add to the problem, a story I heard a decade or
so ago related that when the Huntington picked up the papers from
Martson's apartments in the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, they
were infested with mice and droppings and all sorts of cooties, and
so they were fumigated.  This supposedly caused the Thermofax'ed
documents to fade even more; and it's true that the collection
stinks, despite the best efforts of the very good conservators they
have at the Huntington.  After working with the stuff for a few hours
you start getting headaches.

And we thought it was only electronic records that face
technological obsolescence!


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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