University Products Inc. supply photo storage, adhesives, framing and matting.
Address: 517 Main Street, P.O. Box 101, Holyoke, MA 01041-0101
Phone: (800) 628-1912 – within USA only
Email: info (at) universityproducts.com
or
custserv (at) universityproducts.com
Website: universityproducts.com
For most of this week I have been very carefully packing for long-term storage hundreds of dye transfer prints. We ordered from you packages of non-buffered interleaving sheets that I was pleased to find carried by University Products. As I went along I used as dividers the two sheets of what appeared to be mat board of some sort that were used in packing the interleaving sheets. Why throw out good materials? It never occurred to me that they would not use an acid free material for those end boards in the package, since one might well keep unused sheets for decades before using them, and museum materials often outlast their original purchasers. However, reflecting on the behaviour of most American corporations in recent decades I decided to check with University Products and see if those end boards are in fact sound material for archival purposes, and of course they are not. I do appreciate that they did not lie about it, which many American companies might have done, since the damage might well never become obvious until long after all of us are gone. I would be surprised if those end boards from these packages are not often used by others who just could not imagine that they would not use stable material to package the protective sheets.
Luke Powell