AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

Cultural heritage objects present a special set of challenges for chemical analysis. Often micro-sampling or even contacting the object is deemed an unacceptable risk to the object. Here is presented the successful use of specular reflection FTIR, a non-sampling and non-contact modality for the chemical identification on historic photographs. The method was quite successful with using a spectral library generated from modern reference samples for the identification of single coatings on salted paper prints in the Harvard University class albums from 1853-1863. This work has also been extended to the identification of mixtures of coatings, and multiple distinct layers of coatings on paper objects. The multiple coatings identified on Frederic Flachéron’s paper negatives from Horblit Collection at Houghton Library at Harvard University served as a case study.