The oils on your fingertips are invisible. You can't see them, you can't feel them on a dry day, and yet they're already there — a thin film of skin oil and faint acid, riding on the ridges of every fingerprint. Press a bare thumb onto the glossy face of an old photograph, and you've just done something the photo can't undo. Months later, sometimes years later, a smudge surfaces right where you touched. A fingerprint, etched into the image surface, slowly developing like a ghost. Mary Lynn Ritzenthaler, who runs the conservation lab at the National Archives, is blunt about this in her guidance on family photos: fingerprints can cause permanent stains on all types of photographs.
That's the whole reason this part of the course exists. Everything covered so far has been about the environment — the slow, invisible work of light and humidity and acid eating away at things in storage. But there's a second category of damage, and it's the one you cause yourself, with your own two hands, in the thirty seconds you spend pulling something out of a box to look at it. The good news is that handling is the cheapest agent of deterioration to control. It costs nothing. It just takes knowing a handful of small habits — and unlearning a few that feel completely natural.
So start with the hands, because that's where most people get the very first thing wrong. The instinct, drilled in by every museum movie ever made, is to reach for white cotton gloves. Put the gloves on, handle the precious object, feel like a professional. And for most paper and most photographs, that instinct is wrong.
Here's the problem with cotton gloves. They're clumsy. They kill the sense of touch you actually need to handle something fragile, so you grip harder than you mean to, and you can't feel when a brittle edge is about to give. Worse, cotton picks up grit and snags on torn edges, and it can drag flaking bits of an image right off the surface. The Library of Congress, in its guidance on the care and handling of works on paper, leads its entire list with the simplest possible instruction — have clean hands and a clean work area. Not gloves. Clean, dry, bare hands.
This is the part that trips people up, because it sounds too easy to be the professional answer. But think about what you're actually trying to prevent. The enemy is the oil and acid on your skin transferring to the object. Wash your hands with plain soap, dry them completely, and skip the hand lotion — Ritzenthaler specifically warns that lotions can leave stains. Now your fingertips are about as clean as they're going to get, and you've kept the dexterity that stops you from crushing a corner. For paper and for ordinary prints, clean dry hands beat gloves almost every time.
There's one real exception, and it's worth knowing so you don't over-correct. The shiny, mirror-faced early photographs — the ones on metal or glass, where the image floats on a polished surface — those do want a barrier, because skin oil on that kind of surface is catastrophic and nearly impossible to remove. For those, nitrile gloves, the thin disposable kind, give you protection without the cotton clumsiness. But identifying those particular photographs is its own topic, handled later in the course. For the shoebox of regular snapshots and letters most people are working with — clean, dry, bare hands.
Now, how you pick something up matters as much as what's on your fingers. The natural move, when you want to lift a photo or a document, is to pinch one corner and pull. Don't. A corner is the weakest point on a sheet of paper, and old paper is often brittle in a way that gives no warning. You lift by the corner, the sheet's own weight swings below your fingers, and the paper tears along a crease or just snaps clean off. The professional rule is to support the whole thing. Ritzenthaler's instruction is to handle photographs gently with two hands, or to lift and support them on a folder or a piece of mat board.
That mat-board trick is the single most useful handling habit in this entire section, so stay with it for one more step. You slide a stiff sheet of board — mat board, an acid-free folder, even a piece of clean rigid cardboard in a pinch — underneath the fragile item, and then you move the board. The object never flexes. It never has to support its own weight in mid-air. You've basically built it a little stretcher, the way paramedics move someone with a possible spinal injury — you don't ask the patient to get up and walk, you slide the backboard under and lift the whole thing as one unit. For a cracked, curling, century-old photo, that board is the difference between moving it safely and hearing that small, sickening crackle.
And while we're on the subject of curled photos — if you find one rolled up tight, do not try to flatten it by force. Ritzenthaler is clear: don't force rolled photographs open, because you'll crack them. The emulsion, the image layer, is far less flexible than the paper underneath, and forcing the curl open snaps it. If something seems to be cracking or fighting you as you handle it, the correct move is to stop. Put it down. That's not giving up — that's exactly when an object has crossed the line from a handling job into a job for a conservator, which is where the course lands at the very end.
So here's where it gets a little maddening, because the next set of dangers are the things you probably keep in your desk drawer specifically to organize paper. Every office supply built to hold pages together is, from a preservation standpoint, a small weapon.
Start with the paper clip. It seems harmless — it's just holding two sheets together. But metal clips rust in any humidity, and rust transfers a permanent brown stain shaped exactly like the clip. Even before they rust, they emboss a crease into the paper and snag fibers when you slide them off. The Library of Congress explicitly says: no paper clips, no other fasteners, and no "dog-earing" — that habit of folding down a corner to mark your place. A folded corner becomes a permanent crease, and a crease is where the paper will eventually crack.
Then there are rubber bands, and this one genuinely surprises people. A rubber band wrapped around a bundle of letters feels like the gentlest possible way to keep them together. But rubber degrades. Over a few years it hardens, then it gets sticky, and eventually it melts into a gummy line that fuses directly onto the paper and cannot be removed without taking the paper's surface with it. Open an old desk drawer and you'll often find the evidence — a stack of documents with a hard amber stripe burned across them where a rubber band used to be. The Library of Congress puts rubber bands right alongside tape and glue on the list of things never to use on paper.
Tape is the one everybody already half-suspects, and they're right to. So-called "cellophane" tape — the everyday transparent kind — yellows, the adhesive bleeds into the paper, and it leaves a greasy translucent stain that outlasts the tape itself by decades. The cruel part is that people reach for tape exactly when paper is most vulnerable: to mend a tear. Ritzenthaler's instruction could not be plainer — do not mend photographs with any kind of glue or tape. A torn document is a job to leave alone, or to hand to a professional. A taped document is often a worse problem than a torn one, because now there's adhesive damage layered on top of the original tear.
The same logic kills the sticky note. That little adhesive square you'd use to label a photo or flag a letter leaves residue, and the residue attracts dirt and yellows over time. So does any self-adhesive label. If you need to keep a note with an item, write it on a separate sheet and tuck it into the folder alongside — never stuck onto the object itself.
Which brings up the question of how you do label things, because you will want to. The answer is pencil, never ink. The Library of Congress says to use pencil for any necessary marks, and Ritzenthaler adds the warning about ink and markers around photos — ink bleeds, never fully dries on some surfaces, and can transfer onto whatever the page touches. A ballpoint pen is even worse, because it presses. And here's a detail most people never think about: when you write on the back of a photo or document, the pressure embosses the writing right through to the front. The Library of Congress spells out the fix — only make inscriptions when the paper is resting on a clean, hard surface, and write lightly with pencil, so you don't deboss the words through to the other side as a visible ridge. Not every photo paper will even take pencil. When it won't, you don't fight it — you write the caption on the enclosure instead.
So if someone stopped you right now and asked for the single rule that ties all of these little prohibitions together — paper clips, rubber bands, tape, sticky notes, pens — what would you say? … It's this: never introduce a foreign material that has to be removed later. Every one of those items is something you'd eventually have to peel, pull, or scrape off, and the removal is what does the damage. Preservation handling means adding nothing to the object that wasn't already there.
Now, all of this assumes you're working somewhere safe, and the workspace itself is part of the system. Before anything fragile comes out of its box, clear a space and clean it. The Library of Congress pairs "clean hands" with "clean work area" in the same breath, and that's not an accident — a single grain of grit on the table will scratch a photo surface the moment you set it down. Wipe the surface, make it large enough that the whole item lies flat with room to spare, and keep it well away from the edge so nothing slides off.
The rule that protects more heirlooms than any other in this section is also the most boring one: no food, no drink, anywhere near the work. Ritzenthaler says to avoid food and drink around photos, and the reason is the obvious one. A single knocked-over coffee cup does, in one second, more damage than years of bad storage. Water cockles paper, runs ink, and lifts emulsion. Crumbs feed the insects you're otherwise trying to keep out. The coffee on your desk is, quite literally, the most dangerous object in the room — and it has no business being in the same room as a hundred-year-old letter.
Handling is the moment when you become the agent — delivering light, acid, moisture, and pests straight to the object. Which is exactly why these habits are worth building: they're the only agent of deterioration you control completely, for free, every single time.
Strip all of this down and a few things carry the weight. Clean dry hands beat gloves for ordinary paper and photos. Support the whole object on a stiff board — never lift fragile paper by a corner. Add nothing that has to be removed later, which rules out clips, bands, tape, sticky notes, and pens in one stroke. And keep the food and the coffee in another room. None of it costs money, and all of it is reversible in the only sense that matters: you simply choose, the next time, not to do the harmful thing.
That handful of free habits is the cheapest preservation you'll ever do. But habits only protect what you take out and put back — the real test is what the object lives inside the rest of the time, sealed away in the dark, which means the question of what to put it in, and which of those reassuring labels on the box actually mean anything.