GeezerVison

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (January 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must follow the LLM translation guideline, revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,320 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Papierzerfall]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Papierzerfall}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Slow fire or acid decay is a term used in library and information science to describe paper embrittlement resulting from acid decay. The term is taken from the title of Terry Sanders's 1987 film Slow Fires: On the preservation of the human record.^[1]

Solutions to this problem include the use of acid-free paper stocks, format shifting brittle books by microfilming, photocopying or digitization, and a variety of deacidification techniques.

Much of the early paper made from wood pulp contained significant amounts of alum, a variety of aluminium sulfate salt that is significantly acidic. Alum was added to paper to assist in sizing,^[2] making it somewhat water resistant so that inks did not "run" or spread uncontrollably. Early papermakers did not realize that the alum they added liberally to cure almost every problem encountered in making their product would be eventually detrimental.^[3] The cellulose fibres that make up paper are hydrolyzed by acid, and the presence of alum eventually degrades the fibres until the acidic paper disintegrates in a process known as slow fire. Documents written on rag paper are significantly more stable. The use of non-acidic additives to make paper is becoming more prevalent, and the stability of these papers is less of an issue.

Paper made from mechanical pulp contains significant amounts of lignin, a major component in wood. In the presence of light and oxygen, lignin reacts to give yellow materials,^[4] which is why newsprint and other mechanical paper yellows with age. Paper made from bleached kraft or sulfite pulps does not contain significant amounts of lignin and is therefore better suited for books, documents and other applications where whiteness of the paper is essential.

Paper made from wood pulp is not necessarily less durable than a rag paper. The aging behaviour of a paper is determined by its manufacture, not the original source of the fibres.^[5] Furthermore, tests sponsored by the Library of Congress prove that all paper is at risk of acid decay, because cellulose itself produces formic, acetic, lactic and oxalic acids.^[6]

• Acidic paper
• Acid-free paper
• Double fold
• Wood-pulp paper
• Preservation (library and archive)

• International Journal of Library Science
• Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record at CLIR Films
• Slow Fires: On the Preservation of the Human Record at IMDb

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