'Smell of old books' offers clues to help preserve them

Dec 02, 2009
Old books give off an unmistakable, musty odor that scientists can use to assess the book's condition. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its smell. In a report in ACS' Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal, they describe development of a new test that can measure the degradation of old books and precious historical documents based on their smell. The nondestructive "sniff" test could help libraries and museums preserve a range of prized paper-based objects, some of which are degrading rapidly due to advancing age, the scientists say.

Matija Strlic and colleagues note in the new study that the familiar musty smell of an old book, as readers leaf through the pages, is the result of hundreds of so-called (VOCs) released into the air from the paper. Those substances hold clues to the paper's condition, they say. Conventional methods for analyzing library and archival materials involve removing samples of the document and then testing them with traditional laboratory equipment. But this approach destroys part of the document.

The new technique, called "material degradomics," analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves. They used it to "sniff" 72 historical papers from the 19th and 20th centuries, including papers containing rosin (pine tar) and wood fiber, which are the most rapidly degrading paper types in old books. The scientists identified 15 VOCs that seem good candidates as markers to track the degradation of paper in order to optimize their preservation. The method also could help preserve other historic artifacts, they add.

More information: "Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old ", , http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ac9016049

Source: American Chemical Society (news : web)

Explore further: Crime scene discovery—separating the DNA of identical twins

Related Stories

An inexpensive 'dipstick' test for pesticides in foods

Nov 04, 2009

Scientists in Canada are reporting the development of a fast, inexpensive "dipstick" test to identify small amounts of pesticides that may exist in foods and beverages. Their paper-strip test is more practical ...

Recommended for you

Dead feeder cells support stem cell growth

Apr 24, 2015

Stem cells naturally cling to feeder cells as they grow in petri dishes. Scientists have thought for years that this attachment occurs because feeder cells serve as a support system, providing stems cells ...

User comments : 0

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.
http://phys.org/news179002489.html
phys.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
61279
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:62XAU53HPHSPAZPD2CNMOGD4WJZQTJTF
<urn:uuid:0eeb3c14-2278-4a0b-9e02-e6d6f344fcd3>
2015-04-25T23:47:04Z
69.9.167.167
sha1:337FYCFQ7DB4UYV77UO3I5LCUS6SIRHV
<urn:uuid:8cff240c-b951-4f24-bdf6-7969685fb665>
http://phys.org/news179002489.html
length
response
<urn:uuid:307b40bd-d1a3-4cca-ab89-cb4528f27872>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf