Recorded history is a treasure that can never be replaced. That’s why our team is dedicated to preserving historical documents with accuracy and quality.
Time wears pages thin, and the valuable information recorded there becomes indistinguishable from the page itself. Light discolors the pages, and their edges crisp, fray, and eventually crumble. Dust can damage them, while flood and fire, theft, and other catastrophic events can destroy them forever.
Frequently, our own use of the pages eventually fragments them. Published pages, records, photographs, and hand-written letters were meant to be passed on to posterity, but the more they’re used, the more likely they are to sustain irreversible damage.
Here at Anderson Archival, we are committed to protect and save your precious collection with our historical document preservation services. We professionally preserve each page by digitizing it as an image and combining it with readable, searchable text, so you can continue to enjoy the contents well into the future while simultaneously adding functionality.
Save Your Historical Documents from Extinction: Digitize!
While books and documents eventually fall apart, at Anderson Archival we know how to make their contents live again. Digitization allows you to use, catalogue, share, print, and copy these preserved historical documents much more easily than using the materials themselves. And with easy search tools, you’ll be able to find topics instantly.
Don’t Lose Your Collection to Time or Disaster!
Think of the ancient scrolls of Alexandria lost forever to flames or the historical records incinerated during the book purge in Nazi Germany—volumes forever lost to future generations. Destroyed and damaged libraries such as these are incalculable cultural and intellectual losses. So many irreplaceable volumes have become lost. Don’t let this happen to your library!
Preserving historical documents has never been easier for experts, nor has it ever been so important. Let us help preserve your historical collection forever.
Historical treasures constantly come under threat. Over the last few years, catastrophic flooding in the Midwest and South has impacted areas thought to be safe from rising waters. The record flooding produced by Hurricane Harvey, the largest cyclone in US history, put previous safe havens at risk for the future.
University of Texas Library said, “With any storm of Harvey’s magnitude and destructive impact, staff are paying close attention and preparing for potential issues, but in the case of this hurricane and the position of its landfall, most proactive considerations gave way to planning how to react to whatever damage would inevitably be wrought upon the library and its collections.” The library was rescued as teams jumped in to save it almost immediately.
But what if it had been lost?
The Howard-Tilton Memorial Library of Tulane University was also greatly affected when Hurricane Katrina flooded it with over 8 feet of water, and “As a result, in the Howard-Tilton building alone more than 700,000 of the library’s individual print volumes and recordings were submerged underwater.” Eventually the library was able to salvage and restore 629,711 archival items, which is incredible. But that means over 70,000 items were lost.
When disaster strikes, people are the main concern. But what happens to the private collections stored at their homes another local place affected by the disaster? Unfortunately, many times the owners come back from safety to find the collections damaged beyond repair.
Catastrophes Can Happen Anywhere
Natural disasters aren’t the only cause of damage or loss to historical documents.
On September 11, 2001, the terror attacks not only took the lives of thousands of people; history was lost as well. The Library of Congress states,
The Pentagon sustained damage to its library, which contained more than 500,000 books and documents and a historical collection that dated to the early 1800s. The report said a private disaster recovery company was contracted to help stabilize the collections. The restoration efforts, which cost $500,000, were ultimately successful in saving about 99 percent of the book collection….
The extent of loss in private collections and some public collections may never be known.
Such unexpected horrors could happen anywhere, at any time. The moment of a tragic event is not the time to figure out how to save your historical collection. Let us help safeguard your treasures, so when disaster strikes, your collection is one thing you won’t have to worry about.
Do you have a collection you would like to keep preserved forever? Our digitization process will help you keep your documents safe and secure.
Anderson Archival Can Preserve Your Collection
Our historical document preservation services include (but are not limited to) the following documents:
- Books
- Hand-written letters
- Journals
- Documentation
- Photos
Preserving historical documents is a multi-step process. Your documents are scanned to create top-quality images. We use Optical Character Recognition processes to clean and analyze the documents, and then our team proofreads for word-for-word accuracy. This level of true preservation quality is unique to Anderson Archival. After the proofing comes watermarking and adding metadata, leaving you with a digital document that can be indexed and searched.
Let Anderson Archival help you preserve your historical collection for generations to come.
Would you like to learn more? Visit our historical preservation services page for more information, or contact us at 314.259.1900 to talk to a preservation expert today.
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