in the past at my museum our policy has been to remove metal staples from documents that have been accepted into our archives.  The main reasons are to prevent further staining of the paper by the metal rusting,to prevent the papers from being torn and to place acid free interleaving papers between each piece.  

Recently though, we acquired an original manuscript of a locally written book.  In the last section, there are multiple pages with small colored paper slips stapled on both sides to the letter-sized page.  A question of integrity arose at the collections meeting - if we remove all of those staples and separate all of the paper slips by interleaving them with acid free paper, are we disturbing the original intent of the author who put it together?   And, if they are fairly modern staples and therefore stainless steel and shouldn't rust, do we need to remove them in the first place?  Of course, this still leaves the multiple slips of paper touching the "backing" page - none of which would appear to be acid free.

Suggestions appreciated!

Sylvia

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