About soaking cards

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Posted By: barrysloate

If you found a scrapbook with cards glued in them you might rightly think that the glue would eat into the surface of the card and perhaps slowly destroy it over time. If you brought the scrapbook to a paper conservator, he would recommend carefully removing the cards, cleaning the paste off the back, and probably spraying them with a deacidifying solution to remove the acids. You would actually be doing a good thing because you would be taking active steps to preserve the cards for future generations. So in that scenario aren't you doing a good thing? Removing foreign substances off paper is a positive step, so why do some look at it so negatively? You have not altered anything, you have just removed harmful substances from the surface.