RIT’s Image Permanence Institute Awarded Major Grant to Study Digital Print Preservation

IPI receives $314,215 grant from Institute of Museum and Library Services

            The Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology has received funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for a major research and development project dealing with the preservation of digitally printed materials.

Inkjet, electrophotographic, and dye diffusion thermal transfer materials account for the overwhelming majority of desktop documents and an increasing number of short-run publications and monographs in institutional collections today. Collection care professionals need guidance—first, to determine which objects in their collections have been digitally printed and, second, to understand the nature and preservation needs of such materials.

“Virtually all forms of individual scholarly communication and artistic image creation now depend on only a few technologies for producing hard-copy output,” says James Reilly, Director of RIT’s Image Permanence Institute. “Because these technologies haven’t been systematically studied, a balanced overview of their strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of collection preservation doesn’t exist. We have already observed that the newer media are vulnerable to damage in ways that photographic materials or output from older text recording systems were not. We can’t assume that what is good for traditional materials will be good for digital materials.”

            The IMLS funds will support a two-year study of the potentially harmful effects of enclosures and physical handling on digital prints, as well as their vulnerability to damage due to flood.

            Project results will be published on a unique Web site, The DP3 Project: Digital Print Preservation Portal. The site will contain information and tools to aid in the identification of

digital prints and in understanding their chemical and physical nature; it will offer scientifically sound recommendations for storage, display and handling; and it will guide users in assessing the

risk of damage to these materials in the event of flood so that they might revise their institutional disaster response plans.

The Image Permanence Institute (IPI), part of RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, is a university based, non-profit research laboratory devoted to scientific research in the preservation of visual and other forms of recorded information. It’s the world’s largest independent laboratory with this specific scope.