Holdings Maintenance Guide for Collections and Holdings in Archives

Holdings maintenance refers to the preservation activities that stabilize materials for long-term storage by placing records in appropriate housings and environments. It prolongs the useful life of an archival collection and facilitates access to the records. Sometimes called rehousing, holdings maintenance actions reduce or defer the need for conservation treatment. These actions include:

• improving housing techniques and shelving practices;
• replacing unstable and physically compromised storage materials with enclosures and boxes that meet NARA specifications;
• removing fasteners that are damaging records or interfering with access to information;
• supporting fragile records;
• reformatting unstable materials.

NARA’s Preservation Programs' holdings maintenance guidance focuses on specific formats and conditions. In addition to detailed guidance for paper-based textual records, recommendations for other media types are provided. The video Holdings Maintenance at the National Archives: An Introduction discusses basic concepts for holdings maintenance of paper-based textual records.

These pages describe best practice guidance, but common sense and archival judgment will reveal exceptions. The archival significance, condition and anticipated use of the records, as well as the space available for storing the records and the resources for the project, must be considered when planning and implementing a holdings maintenance project.

A complete listing of holdings maintenance topics and formats is below:

• General Considerations
• Holdings Maintenance for:
  • Paper-Based Records
  • Bound Materials
  • Photographs
  • Film-Based Negatives and Positives
  • Machine-Readable Media
  • Artifacts Found in Archival Holdings
• Reference and Additional Resources

General Considerations

• Assessing Records for Holdings Maintenance
• Collecting Supplies and Setting Up a Work Area
• Records Suspected to be Contaminated with Mold, Pest and Other Hazardous Deposits
• Preservation Reformatting

Paper-Based Records

• Storage Boxes
• Using Folders
• Writing Notations on Textual Records
• Using Polyester Sleeves
• Unstable and Acidic Paper Records
• Records with Tears and Records Torn into Multiple Pieces
• Folded Records
• Rolled Records
• Fastened Documents
• Maintaining Association When Fasteners Must be Removed
• Records with Tape and Adhesives
• Oversize Paper-Based Records

Bound Materials

• Bound Volumes
• Scrapbooks and Albums

Photographs

• Handling Photographs
• Using Enclosures for Photographs
• Damaged Photographs
• Three-Dimensional Photographic Formats

Film-Based Negatives and Positives

• Polyester Film
• Cellulose Acetate Film
• Cellulose Nitrate Film
• Photographic Negatives, X-Rays, and Similar Sheet Films
• Microfilm, Microfiche, and Other Microforms
• Motion Picture Film

Machine-Readable Media

• Audio and Video Tape
• Grooved Sound Recordings
• Optical Discs
• Electronic Magnetic Media
• Solid State Media

Artifacts Found in Archival Holdings

• Handling
• Documentation
• Conservation of Artifacts
• Labeling
• Protective Enclosures and Storage Containers
• Internal Storage Support Methods

Reference

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