Scrapbook safety

• By ELLYN COUVILLION
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 12, 2009 - Page: 1D

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For people pressed for time, scrapbooks with “magnetic” pages can seem a godsend, in the battle to keep up with family photos.

Just slap the photos down, and there’s one album done. But for the pictures themselves? Not so good.

“They’re very bad,” Melissa Eastin, archivist with the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, said of the scrapbooks at a workshop on “Making Memories Last.”

The plastic overlays in many of those type scrapbooks are made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which has the unfortunate property of causing them to eventually stick to the photographs, Eastin said.

“It’s best to remove items from them (the scrapbooks) and rehouse them,” she said.

At the workshop at the East Baton Rouge Parish Bluebonnet Regional Branch Library, Eastin addressed how to best make photographs and newspaper clippings last. 

“Photographs are the most tangible representation of our memories, and we usually have a lot of them,” Eastin said.

Photographs, though, are especially vulnerable and can be damaged by sunlight, age, chemicals that are in the photos themselves and handling.

Eastin said that any handling can be a threat to photos, but that leaving them untouched is “not the nature of these types of memories.”

People are going to hold them, frame them and store them.

In the best of all “keepsake” worlds, people would store their photographs in individual plastic sleeves made, not of PVC, but of polyester, polypropylene or polyethylene, she said.

The plastic sleeves would be open, not sealed, so the photographs could “breathe,” and would be stored supported and upright, in a file folder, she said.

Most people, though, want to enjoy their treasured photos in  a scrapbook, she said.
Scrapbooks with open, plastic sleeves  are available.