Chemical Conservation of Paper-Based Cultural Heritage

Dear Colleagues,

For millennia, paper has been the ultimate messenger of human wisdom, delivering information on the zeitgeist of each era across the boundary of time. However, paper undergoes severe deterioration along its lengthy life course, hence requiring intensive care to protect it. Chemists can play crucial roles in this mission, considering the interdisciplinary nature of the field of chemistry. The relationship between heritage science and applied chemistry is particularly close when facing a system as complex as paper heritage, where intrinsic and extrinsic factors are entangled to form convoluted degradation mechanisms. Currently, as the public’s awareness of cultural heritage protection increases, an ever-growing effort has been devoted to the preservation and conservation of paper-based historical heritage. Studies on aging mechanisms and lifetime evaluation have emerged, and a kaleidoscope of preventive/remedial conservation techniques has thrived on the basis of multiple functionalized materials. Nevertheless, there are always blanks to fill in, regarding finding suitable monitoring tools, specifying conservational environment parameters, and determining more feasible protection methods.

Therefore, this Special Issue aims to provide updates on the latest development in analysis and characterization techniques, new insight into degradation mechanisms, and freshly proposed conservation methods on the topic of paper-based cultural heritage chemistry.

Dr. Yueer Yan
Prof. Dr. Yi Tang
Prof. Dr. Yuliang Yang
Guest Editors

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