I work in the archive on the campus of the University of Houston.  We use a regular flatbed scanner for most or our jobs, however we don't house many Civil War collections.  Most of our collections are 20th century.  Doing it once will not severely damage it.  There are other scanners that might work better, but getting one or using one may cost money.  You might also try a book scanner that does not use a light bar.  Most archives will let you take photos of certain documents without flashes, so that is also an option.  So I would see no problem using something like that.

I would wear cotton or nitrile (powder free) gloves when handling the papers though.  

Someone who is a document/paper conservator might have more input.  In my experience any light is damaging to paper.  The less scanning or exposure to light the better, but if it means that you have a digital copy for the rest of your life then it might be worth it before the letters degrade on their own.

Matt Campbell

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Melanie C King <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hey everyone,

My father-in-law wants to take his "family archives" (old letters and photographs, some possibly dating back to the Civil War) and create electronic copies of them, but we aren't sure the best way to do this.

I only have experience with prehistoric Southwestern artifacts, so this really isn't my field, but I do know sometimes certain lights and such can have extremely negative effects and so we wanted to make sure we weren't going to damage anything in this process.

I've already told him about possible issues from handling the papers too much with bare hands, but we weren't sure if a standard at-home scanner would cause issues or if certain regular cameras can cause issues either.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, we're really hoping we can get this project started so we can share their history with generations to come without worrying about the physical documents being in too much of harm's way.

Thank you again,

Melanie Deer

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