Who Needs a Records Preservation Program? An Office-by-Office Guide

Every office that keeps permanent records will need a preservation program sooner or later. The only real variable is whether it starts on a schedule the office chooses or on one set by a burst pipe, a crumbling index book or an attorney who can't read the page a title depends on. This guide goes through the offices and organizations that hold permanent records, what they typically keep, what tends to go wrong, and how to tell whether your own shelves need attention before they announce it themselves.

The short version

If your retention schedule lists any series as permanent, you need a plan for keeping it. That plan doesn't have to be expensive or complicated in the early years. It does have to exist on paper, with someone's name on it, and it has to cover the originals as well as any copies. Our preservation FAQ answers the common first questions: what counts as permanent, why microfilm alone isn't enough, and who pays.

Office by office

The names change from state to state – a recorder of deeds in one place is a register of deeds, a county recorder or a town clerk somewhere else – but the records and the risks are much the same everywhere.

Office	Typical permanent records	Typical risks
Recorder / register of deeds	Deeds, mortgages, releases, liens, plats, grantor–grantee indexes	Daily handling by title searchers, broken spines, old tape, mid-century lamination, oversized plat books
Town or municipal clerk	Meeting minutes, ordinances, vital records, election results; land records in many New England towns	Small or improvised vaults, one-person offices, records scattered between town hall, attic and old schoolhouse
County clerk	Commissioners' minutes, election canvasses, marriage records, military discharges, naturalization records in some counties	Heavy public use, sensitive personal data, basements prone to flooding
Assessor	Tax maps, assessment rolls and grand lists, property record cards	Maps folded or rolled for decades, pencil annotations, cards worn soft at the edges
Clerk of court / prothonotary	Dockets, judgment indexes, case files, naturalization papers	Tri-folded papers with rusting pins and staples, iron gall ink, sheer volume
Probate court / register of wills	Wills, estate inventories, guardianships	Varied papers, wax seals and ribbons, constant genealogical demand
Auditor, treasurer, comptroller	Ledgers, bond and warrant registers, annual reports	Large ledgers on cheap paper, leather bindings turning to powder
Engineering and public works	Plans, as-built drawings, survey notebooks, utility and road maps	Blueprints and diazo prints that fade in light, linen tracings that cockle in water, rolled storage
Historical and genealogical societies	Donated diaries, account books, maps, scrapbooks, photographs	Unknown storage history, mold, mixed materials, volunteer handling
Corporate archives	Charters, minute books, stock ledgers, patents, drawings	Records orphaned by moves, mergers and reorganizations
Religious institutions	Baptism, marriage and burial registers, vestry and session minutes, cemetery records	Storage in rectories and basements, heavy genealogical use
Schools and colleges	Board minutes, student registers, transcripts, yearbooks	Transcripts requested for decades, privacy rules, boiler-room storage

A few notes on the rows that surprise people. Assessors often don't think of themselves as keepers of permanent records, but historic tax maps and grand lists are some of the most consulted documents in local history and title work. Engineers and public works departments hold drawings that are still needed whenever a road is widened or a water main is dug up, and blueprints are among the least stable copies ever made. Churches and small historical societies hold records that no government office duplicates, so if their registers are lost, the information is gone for good.

Where to find people in the same boat

You won't be the first person in your position. NACRC, the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks, and PRIA, the Property Records Industry Association, both bring together people who deal with land and county records every day. Municipal clerks have their own state associations, and archivists have the Society of American Archivists and NAGARA. Your state archives is often the most useful contact of all, because it writes or approves your retention schedule and usually knows which neighboring offices have already been through a restoration project.

Why paper fails: acid, ink and hands

The main enemy is acid. Paper made before about the middle of the nineteenth century was mostly made from linen and cotton rags. It was strong, long-fibered and, by and large, fairly stable, which is why a well-kept volume from the 1790s can be in better shape than one from the 1890s. From roughly 1850 onward, mills turned more and more to wood pulp, and the papers they made, along with the alum-rosin sizing used to stop ink from feathering, carried acid into the sheet. Acid breaks the cellulose chains that give paper its strength. The paper yellows, then browns, then turns brittle enough to snap at a fold.

That isn't the whole story. Earlier rag paper is generally sound, but some of the inks written on it are not. Iron gall ink, the standard writing ink for centuries, can be acidic enough to eat through the lines of writing and leave a lace of holes where the letters were. Our article on iron gall ink corrosion explains how that happens. Copying inks, aniline dyes and some typewriter ribbons fade or bleed instead. Then there are the hands: patrons, title searchers and staff who turn pages by the corner, lean on open books and pull volumes off the shelf by the top of the spine.

The good news is that acid damage can be stopped. Deacidification neutralizes the acid already in the paper and leaves an alkaline reserve to absorb more. It doesn't make brittle paper strong again, but it slows further decay to a crawl, which is why it belongs early in any program rather than at the end.

Warning signs your records need attention

Walk your vault with a notepad and a flashlight. Any of these means a volume or series should be looked at by someone who knows what they're looking at:

Red or brown powder on your hands after handling a leather binding. That's red rot, and the leather is breaking down.
Boards detached or hanging by a thread, spines split, sections loose.
Leaves loose or missing, or pages tucked back in out of order.
Paper that breaks at the folds or crumbles at the corners when a page is turned.
Yellow, orange or brown tape stains, or tape carriers that have dropped off and left a sticky patch behind.
A musty smell, fuzzy spots or soft, stained paper. Mold, active or dormant. Don't open the book further; isolate it.
Tide lines and cockled pages, the signature of an old leak that may have left mold spores behind.
Writing that has turned brown and is cracking or dropping out, especially in early volumes with iron gall ink.
Faded copies: blueprints, diazo prints, carbon copies and thermal fax paper going pale.
Laminated pages yellowing or lifting, or a vinegar smell from laminate or from old microfilm boxes.
Rubber bands, paper clips and sticky notes in the books. Each one is a small, slow injury.
Volumes routinely copied face down on a flatbed copier.

None of these is an emergency on its own, mold and active leaks aside. Together, they tell you where to start.

A ten-minute self-assessment

Answer yes or no. Be honest; nobody else is reading it.

Do we have a current retention schedule, and do we know which series on it are permanent?
Do we know where every permanent record is, including the attic, the old town hall, the off-site storage unit and the boxes in the treasurer's closet?
Does every permanent series have a security copy, on film or digital, stored somewhere other than this building?
Do we monitor temperature and relative humidity where the records live, and does someone look at the data? (Our article on environmental monitoring for a records vault covers the basics.)
Has anyone surveyed the condition of our volumes in the last ten years?
Is there a written disaster plan with current phone numbers for a recovery vendor and a conservator?
Have we banned tape, rubber bands and sticky notes from the records?
Is there a written handling policy for the public, and do staff enforce it?
Is there a budget line, fee account or grant plan for preservation, even a small one?
Does someone on staff have preservation in their job description?

Seven or more yeses and you have a program, whether or not anyone calls it one. Four to six, and you have the outline of a program that needs filling in. Three or fewer means it's time to put a survey at the top of next year's budget request.

Doing it costs less than not doing it

The phrase you'll hear in this field is that preservation is cheap compared to the alternative. It sounds like a sales line until you price the alternative.

The cost of doing is visible and predictable: a condition survey, a few volumes treated each year, better shelving, a monitoring logger, a security copy. You can phase it, put it in a capital plan and show the council exactly what each dollar bought.

The cost of not doing is invisible until it arrives all at once. Picture a hypothetical county whose most-used index book finally comes apart in a searcher's hands. The book goes out for emergency treatment, which usually costs more and saves less than planned work would have. While it's gone, searches slow down, staff answer the same complaint all day, and copy-fee revenue tied to that series dips. If pages are lost rather than damaged, the problem moves from the vault to the courtroom. Most states have procedures for re-establishing lost records, written largely because nineteenth-century courthouses burned, and those procedures are slow, expensive and never as good as the original.

Then add disaster recovery. Records that were stored well and copied off-site come through a flood as an inconvenience. Records that were neither come through it as a crisis, with freeze-drying bills, mold remediation and gaps that can't be filled.

Put those two columns side by side for your governing body, as specifically as you can. Our guide to preservation workshops and making the case for funding goes into how to present it. In our experience, councils rarely object to preservation once they see what neglect would cost. They object to surprises, and a program on paper is the best protection against one.