 I last gave this talk or parts of this talk in Puerto Rico in 2003 at PMG and that's why I have the title because at the time the news that I had about some of these topics was actually somewhat depressing and difficult and actually for the last, let's see what I'm bad at math, the last 13 years until the most recent revision of NFPA 40 which I'll get into what that is, there really was a problematic aspect to taking care of your cellulose nitrate film but I'll let me let me go back and talk about cellulose nitrate the first film this is a bit of a quick reprise of what has already been covered very well by some of our other speakers this morning but it's interesting so Fernanda this beginning date of any photographic process is always so exciting because you have to put a date down so then people disagree with you or they use different dates so I was in a bit of a panic when she said 1887 what do you mean 1887 so this is because I clearly chose the Kodak introduction date of the flexible film not the more rigid film that she described but it can just be careful with your dates but that's why I have 1989 and then 1950s because as I'll get into a little bit later there's a time period where it's getting phased out you can particularly you have a lot of dates that are sort of Kodak related to the US and I'll make a call for people's information about film use in their parts of the world because I think we're clearly finding in pockets of our collections that nitrates continue to use well past that 1951 date that we commonly use but I'll get into that but why use it I mean it's actually a really great material it's strong it's transparent it's durable I think it was relatively inexpensive to make particularly compared to acetate and but it did have some issues and its biggest one is that it is it is a hazardous material and I don't want to make I don't want to overly dramatize this but it is a it is a technically a hazardous material it is a class 4.1 flammable solid in the United States which is important for a lot of things it means it's not explosive and it means it's not in the spontaneous combustion class so people will make both of those statements and it's technically not correct it's a class 4.1 flammable solid so it is unusual for a cultural material to be a hazardous material but it is it is what we have and you really do have to be mindful of safety first there were discussions of fires in various repositories the clinic the Cleveland Clinic fire in particular people do die in these fires that it's a serious issue but people dying other kinds of fires to libraries and archives have lots of paper lots of buildings have parking garages underneath them with actually explosive fuel in all of the cars and people don't get in a panic about that but when you say that their cellulose nitrate in your institution and people don't know about it they get excited in a kind of irrational way so part of what I'm trying to explain to you is some of the basics and to because you will know after the basics probably more than anybody else in that building on this topic and you need to be confident in what you know and you need to be a good advocate for these materials because in fact they're quite quite good materials if you take care of them properly this is a nitrate negative it's from FSA from about 1942 from not that far away I couldn't find a Tucson or Arizona nitrate negative I was irritated about that this is as close as I could get it was safety related and it was from Las Vegas so it was pretty close so yeah so just fire I mean it's it can this is where there were some National Bureau of Standards the predecessor to NIST did some tests on behalf of a lot of the archival community in the 40s they were burning hundreds of pounds of film and it does have explosive like qualities because it burns so quickly it generates a lot of gas and it can find in enclosure or space it will actually create so much pressure that it will cause problems that are like explosions but it's really more about the way in which it it burns not in the way in which it actually is as a material and that's why it's that 4.1 but it's not something to be trifled with in 2003 and I know some people will be disappointed because they'll expect some really cool video of fire we didn't have YouTube so just go to YouTube lots of cellulose nitrate examples and but to my eye they're a little sad they're really about sort of destruction for the sake of destruction and it makes me sad I didn't want to show them but if you want to see a fire cinema Paradiso has an example of cellulose nitrate fire from a projector and Inglourious Bastards has a whole part where it's a very critical part to the plot which I won't get into but if you want to know about nitrate fire those are good places to see them so this is for acetate film but you can really apply it to nitrate film as well and in a broad sense and that it has this these plastics have this unusual material or quality where most things just deteriorate at this nice gradual slope it just goes like this but these have its autocatalytic component where it feeds on itself after a period of time and the deterioration really takes off so with both of these plastics it's important to just know where you are so that was one of the things John Lee was talking about are you near this point are you after it are you before it and then do things like cold storage to slow that down so you're advancing on this curve is just as slowly as you can so it's interesting to consider there are aspects to film deterioration that do have a quality of patina mirroring is one of them so I would say that one of the goals I would I would posit is that we're just trying to make things slowly deteriorate sort of the way paintings do or good quality papers do not happen where they're unusable in your career so cold storage does that and it keeps things from doing this this is where gradually the gelatin gets tacky it breaks down because of the nitric acid that's generated and enclosures and other things stick to it gets stuck to itself in a film can it does this turns into hockey pucks and other kinds of nasty things and it's quite true that by the time you get to this point this material is considerably more flammable than when it's in good condition so you'll often see in the literature that it can burn spontaneously in conditions as low as say 120 degrees that's if it's in that condition in very poor condition like this for many many days generally speaking good quality film even film probably in this state has a flash point of about 300 Fahrenheit degrees which is is you know most storage environments aren't 300 degrees and likely to get it 300 degrees so you know paper has a flash point of somewhere between 400 and 600 degrees so in and of itself as long as you don't catch it on fire it's a pretty safe material but that's the that's the kicker because when it catches on fire it generates its own oxygen and it's very difficult to put it out once it starts and so that's why it burns so quickly it generates that kind of explosive gas quality or it's it spreads very quickly it's very hard to put out so the key thing is like with all of our cultural property we actually don't want it to catch on fire so let's just try hard to make sure it doesn't catch on fire and I think when you go through the literature on why cellulose nitrate fires happen they really happen because people aren't doing a good job of taking care of them you do a good job of taking care of them and you know sort of the parameters which I'll go into you really don't have an unmanageable level of risk we have a very extensive amount of material at the Library of Congress we have close to a quarter million nitrate negatives of different vintages as early as the very early days of film these are from Arnold Gentha and views of San Francisco before the earthquake these are in very good condition by the way survey them from time to time we have also during FSA farm security administration we have a lot of material this isn't from FSA per se but it's from that same time period this is in a set of prints and negatives from Ansel Adams of the Manzanar internment camps and he gave them to the library expressly so that we had a record and we were holding it of what happened he was he didn't think it was a good idea to have done it and I think the negatives are a critical part of that story it's that he had finished prints and negatives he wanted us to have the evidence of this he didn't want it just to be prints he wanted us to also have the negatives so getting into that we have a we have an archive of printing practice we have evidence of these different materials and so some of these are acetate some of them are nitrate and then we have iconic images this is probably one of our most iconic photographic images at the library migrant mother which is from farm security administration and is a nitrate negative so this was always something interesting when you were looking at it in FBA 40 because they would say well generally people are copying their film and and and disposing of the nitrate and that's just not our practice with still picture film for sure we're not we're not going to get rid of this not going to get rid of this we're probably not even going to get rid of this I mean this is critically important documentation of baseball but it's on nitrate but we have a huge you know all of our repositories of nitrate have have examples like this I had dates there and one of the things to keep in mind is that we as I mentioned before you know this 1951 date is kind of thrown out there as a very broad date but in fact codex publication from 1979 outlines for their materials in the U.S. other dates that for different classes of material and this is actually quite helpful if you're you're trying to determine things where you don't have good edge markings or other ways of identifying it if you have a good date or somewhat reliable date this can be a helpful this can be a helpful thing now some of this is in a frequently asked questions type of format of article about cellulose nitrate that's in I think topics 8 I need to revise all of this as we'll get to you'll see there's been significant changes so I'll be revising all of this and it'll probably be in the next topics and it'll have a lot of this information that you'll see in the slides so so we have a lot of nitrate at the library and during my time there we've actually built new nitrate vaults we're one of the few places that have recently built a nitrate vault the others being the National Archives of Canada slightly after ours the film archive at UCLA and the MoMA film the excuse me the MoMA film vault so this is a very very large facility it has 124 rooms like this 118 of them are for motion picture film and six of them are for still picture film which gives you a sense of the scale of this but this is a hallway it goes all the way down here and then it turns and goes down this way about as far so it's right you can see this is a picture of the where motion picture campuses in suburb sort of far remote suburban Virginia from Washington DC that this is an overhead view this is this courtyard here so you can see that this this number of this hallway is about as long as this building is wide it's big so we have we have a lot of nitrate film and because we have so much motion picture film we've always historically incorporated the still picture film into that broader care one of our challenges when we were designing this is that a lot of work went into building these compartments this is this is the kind of material or kind of approach that's explicitly described in NFPA 40 but we created our own set of cabinets because at the time NFPA 40 didn't really outline what to do with still picture film particularly well and so we created a new set of compartments that follow the same rules as motion picture film that take into account the fact that you need to store film on edge typically in sleeves you don't want to put it in a film can I think it's one of the reasons why anecdotally we have nitrate still picture film in good condition because the paper sleeve that's typically in is actually I think beneficial to it and being in a metal can and I'm not so sure it's such a good idea so there was some discussion early on well why can't I just take all my film like this and just put it in film cans and I was just like I'm not gonna that I'm just not gonna do that that's not a good practice but that's that's where there's elements of the standard that were so film oriented motion picture film oriented that it made it kind of difficult there's a lot of education so the reason I'm talking about this is that as a fire standard NFPA 40 is typically cited in most building codes in the United States and actually it's a frequently cited standard outside of the United States to buy other governments other national entities there's some rules about transporting it and there's some rules about disposing of it and I'll go over these pretty quickly and again some of this is is is in the topics article and will be in the revised one so NFPA 40 just had a revision in 2016 and that's that's where there's a lot of really good news and so I'm just gonna briefly update you on some important things some of this is the same as the previous one but if you have nitrate material you really should be familiar with NFPA 4016 it's not particularly expensive it's about $46 and you can download it pretty quickly but it applies to everyone whether you have still picture film motion picture film the original standard for decades of time only covered motion picture film so you're sort of in that you didn't have much helpful guidance on the still picture side so it includes both and it also now has language it's a little more helpful that really describes that you can have things in permanent storage which is helpful because there is this notion of well if this is so dangerous and so problematic why don't you just copy it and and get rid of it and for all sorts of reasons that's not a good idea and what not likely to happen so it's nice to have the standard explain it that way the standard also has a peculiar aspect to it that it's it describes itself as a retroactive standard so a lot of standards will be that like with say you're building in your house that your house gets built at a certain time and it's built to code at that time and you say well it doesn't if you were to build it now it wouldn't be following code but because it followed code when it was built it's still considered in code in the case of this standard however it explicitly says that it's not that way and that you have to follow the standard whatever the most current version is so so over time you have to keep up with when the new versions come out and if people are watching this webcast in say three or four years if it's 2020 you should be mindful that there probably is another standard and a revision it gets very tricky we follow for various reasons two different versions of NFPA 40 because the way the building code works in Virginia and at least our part of Virginia for that building is that we actually follow the building code of the time when it was built and it doesn't matter what the standard says so this gets also very legally and complicated so I as a disclaimer I'm not a lawyer I'm not a transportation expert I know about preservation of these things but when you have it this film and particularly in large quantities you really do need at some point to get involved with other parts of your institution safety officers possibly legal counsel on how you're managing this as a risk because it's a safety standard this is a it's a safety issue it has a nice issue though of equivalency which it it explicitly says that if you can come up with something that is just as safe you don't have to follow this so this was always an aspect of something that we tried to follow where if we were straying away from what the standard said or didn't say we felt confident that we were doing something that was equivalently safe and often it was equivalently safe and and actually better for the material cold storage being one of those examples so you so now we're getting into real brass tax kind of things this standard came into being because for a long time motion picture film was it it was a huge industry transporting transportating transporting film sending it to different theaters getting those those copies ready so that there were a lot of rules that were basically making this remain viable because of the importance of the motion picture industry in this country and the demand for people to want to see movies so now you can have what's described as everything in the standard in the actual explicit part of the standard the front part of the standard isn't is in feet and rolls because it's all about motion picture film and so we we started following the standard in the 80s we did a lot of work to figure out equivalent weights of still picture film which I'll get to in a second there's now an annex that describes similar weights in the standard which is very helpful but it's basically two standard roles per person in a room and any room where you have more than 10 standard roles you need an automatic sprinkler system so these are just some of the basic rules are a lot more in the standard but you need to be mindful of whatever you have out you you probably should you shouldn't really have more than 10 pounds the biggest problem with earlier versions of NFPA 40 where that they really did not do a good job of describing what you should do with relatively small amounts of film and now it's much clearer and this is probably the best news of the whole thing is that you are now encouraged to put things in cold storage and you can put less than 25 pounds in a laboratory great what they describe as laboratory grade refrigerator or freezer and that's really great people have been doing this for many decades of time it's a recommendation in Henry Wilhelm's book on color deterioration and film deterioration and it would be the kind of advice from a preservation point of view that I would make to people that have particularly small amounts of film but then I would have to qualify it by saying and you're not following the standard and you'll have to make sure that that's okay with everybody but it's better to have the film in the cold and I don't know of any fire that's happened because of being stored in these in these types of arrangements so this isn't very much as we'll get into but it is something the other very important thing is that they say between 25 and 750 pounds you can put it in a freezer you just have to comply with these parts of the standard which basically I think means I need to work with them architects and engineers on this but I think you could construct a ballet box that could follow these rules you actually you wouldn't have to build a technical vault you could build a ballet box with certain fire protection walls four hour rated walls possibly one hour rated walls that have to look in the standard but it's you need an event for gases and some other things but it's it's actually doable and then you then you get into what we call the vaults like I was showing for over 750 pounds the 750 pounds is is roughly speaking one half of that wall in the vault so it's it's many document boxes record storage boxes worth of film so here's an example Heather this may look familiar to you this is the the small freezer that holds some other Genfa negatives at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco so this is an example where when I was working with their staff and they were asking me questions about it they said well we're putting it in this freezer is that a good idea and it's like well yes it's a very good idea in my view but you can't really explicitly do that and so now they can't so now it's all that this is from their blog post so this is this is free and out there but this is their night this is about probably a few pounds and it's in this nice little freezer and based on the the charts and other things that it'll last for literally centuries of time in here so it's it's now a very stable very stable place so here's the here's the as I said this is not that change from what's in the topics article Sarah Wagner in the 80s weighed a lot of film with my colleague Donna Collins we then once I got to the library we we we did this and then when we started having to move film we did it again so we've we've weighed film three separate times and we feel very confident of these numbers so this gives you a sense so when you're reading the standard you can say you know one reel five reels the limit for use is now at ten pounds this is this is a slight error so it's but this is a reasonable amount of material to have out at time and then this is the comparable amounts the NFP 40 standard currently in that in the annex describes eight by ten and five by seven amounts and doesn't do a good job of describing these other formats and I would say it's a shame because you in fact eight by ten film in my experience is much thicker than the other formats and so it actually it gives you a false sense of how little you can have in a given space these formats are much thinner nitrates very strong so they it's a it's good for thin kinds of film so that you really can have more material than you would think if you were just cutting down eight by ten film I feel very confident of these numbers and what I would say if you have large amounts of film you should just weigh some of your film and and find out what your film weighs and I think that would go a long way to describing to somebody that you've done your due diligence it's not you know yes the chart says this but I've weighed my film and I know how much it weighs so that that's not that's not too difficult the other nice thing about the standard well let me just show you a picture of a vault so so this is a sort of typical nitrate vault and this is a more typical I think this is actually a narrow vault it's a it but it's like a just a large room it's from Steve I hadn't got it a long time ago but it's just you can see it doesn't have compartments there's a lot more material in here these have separate fireproof compartments the idea being that a fire can start in one of the compartments it won't spread to the other cans and then their deluge sprinklers up here that will that will arrest the fire so you might only just have some loss if you had a fire start in here our conditions for our vaults are 35 Fahrenheit about three centigrade and 30% relative humidity and that has a lot of to do with the scale of material that we have and then and the desire to not have water freeze in our in our pipes I think now we can consider other options for some more valuable film because we have these other options which we didn't have before and we may consider that I feel very comfortable with 39 Fahrenheit for I mean in my career will not change significantly but I think if you really are thinking about 500 year horizon a thousand year horizon a colder temperature than 39 is probably a good idea but keep in mind that better can be the enemy of good it's better for you to just get it at 39 and my predecessor they want to tackle this they can make it colder than 39 you know we have film now in very good in very good environment in the last unchanged for maybe acquiring a little patina I like that idea over decades of time but not not a loss of them of the collection so storage so you can put it in a film can the standard is real helpful about that film can great I'm not going to put my film I still film in a film can so you have to put it in a DOT approved container which is kind of called the 4g box so then you have to do lots of work this is my wife and she worked at this Smithsonian archives they have a lot of nitrate film and we store their film for them and so she was having to refile all of her things out of out of document boxes into these other boxes so we had to do a lot of that for some moves but it basically gets put into a liner box that's made out of good quality material and you put it into the 4g box and these two layers this is what the standard says I need to revisit this there's some rules that have changed it appears on the 4g box side that I want to clarify so that I can give you better guidance about putting things in the right kind of container it seems a little strange if you're really not going to move your material much to have it in a in a transportation rated thing when it's just going to stay in your vault and it's going to go outside to your staging area and back but that's the way the standard is written and it's just an element of that you have to be aware of the other really really helpful thing about the standard right now is that it now explicitly describes that you should have your sheet film in paper enclosures which is awesome this was this huge argument that I would get into all the time with our safety folks and our fire folks because they would say well the weight should include the paper sleeves and I'm like I don't want to include the paper sleeves because I'm reducing the density of the material by putting in the box plus it has all this labeling information I have to have this leave I have to have this leave I don't think it should count the paper is flammable but it's not adding actually that much fire load compared to the nitrate that's with it and plus in my experience with fires paper materials are much better in fires because they absorb a lot of water and would help you cool down the fire that's how you put down it put out a nitrate fire so this isn't it this is good so it very clearly make in this standard now says that you can have things in paper sleeves they recommend it for still picture film and it also is very clear from my reading of the standard that it it's not part of the weight so it's resolved this issue in a good way as far as I'm concerned the one thing I would say and this is a good a thanks to Peter is that this Peter would never allow this kind of what's a four flap envelope I know what they mean but the term is for a flap enclosure envelopes don't have more than one flap typically so this is the kind of thing that when we use it like say 18902 Peter was very very thorough in standards meetings about getting things correct and this is just an example of a little bit of in a in exact stuff that makes you a little concerned about other parts of the standard but you know what they mean but Peter was very good about making sure that things were correct so quickly go through transportation if you have a lot of film this becomes this becomes a bit of a nightmare there are all sorts of rules my my colleague Donna Collins is the she is the master of these rules she has special training in doing this it's you just need if you have a lot of film to move that is hundreds of pounds to move you need and you're having a shipper do it you need to be very careful about it and follow these rules we've had to move the film back and forth lots of times between Washington Dayton Ohio back back and then back to its new home in Culpeper but we thousands of miles lots of trucks a real headache but we did it nothing happened we had to pop so that's why we had to have all these boxes in particular we had to have these boxes because we were transporting them and we felt like we really had to follow the rules takes lots of time and effort lots of people we they ended up being put into drums into and oil drums with packing material around them these are some polyethylene slings you can get them in and out this is also particularly helpful for the film cans takes a lot of people that's me in younger days sitting on there well we're all exhausted we had to do this once we had to do it let's see we started on it the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and had to have everything out by Saturday that was a fun week because they forgot that the still picture film was in the vault that was that was brilliant but it all worked out shouldn't have said that is now recorded for posterity but so so be it I said it so 10 truckloads 80 drums this is all of the material it's a lot it's a lot the one thing is that then people bring up they're like well can't we just get rid of it well actually you can but it costs even more to get rid of it than it does to transport it it costs about twice as much to dispose of it and be careful do not say you're going to get rid of it because once you've said you're going to get rid of it it's not a hazardous material anymore it's hazardous waste and you can't take it back and now you have a real headache on your time on your hands because time is ticking so do be very very careful about how you say you're going to discard film have a process and say we're considering it but do not say you're going to get rid of it because then you can't move it as hazardous material anymore you have to move it as hazardous waste and you have to have someone do it for you you can't do it yourself so be careful that so there's a truck and then you have to get into fun logistics like this like where do you put all of the drums and all of the all of this stuff we had to all these shipments cram it all in here then you get into other fun things like you know freezer trucks they don't have lift gates because they back up into into storage areas that don't need lift gates well how do you get pallets of this material into the truck so you have to have a forklift so you have to you have forklift in nitrate foam is not something you want to have forklift go into a can drum so fun times fun times so be careful about disposal as I said it can be it can be expensive and you need to be careful about how you're saying you're going to dispose of it so generally my recommendation is that you have a formal deaccessioning process and you should follow it with these materials and you don't deaccession it until you've worked out that you actually are going to dispose of it and how you're going to do it and you just say well we're in the process of considering to deaccession that that seems to make people happy so what to do this is a lot of information I've been talking real quickly I think it's just more to update you that if you have particularly small amounts of film you have a lot of options the other thing is that the standard doesn't go into great detail about like you you can't put 50 pounds of film in a refrigerator or freezer but it doesn't say how many refrigerators or freezers you can have in a building so that's a there's a little bit of wiggle room in there you can't have just infinite amounts of little tiny freezers but I think that you could if you had 75 pounds you probably could have reasonably three set freezers or refrigerators separated by various fire rated walls and I think you would be well within the spirit of the of the standard but again you need to work with your other stakeholders in your institution you need to know how much you have you need to know the quantity you know you need to know where it is and you really do need to know the condition and as I said you will be the expert on this and I think that's one of the other things that Peter was really helpful on he I serve on the ISO photographic standards and Peter made it really clear what a good and well-thought-out standard was like and that was really helpful for me when we're trying to interpret NFPA 40 particularly before 2016 where it was very difficult to interpret and it made me much more confident of how to navigate through interpreting a standard because people will take them sort of very literally and they're generally products of consensus and they're written in such a way that you really can make good decisions but it's really important that if you have a large amount of this that you get familiar with the standard and and talk with other people in terms of best practices of what they do because you really have two concerns you have a safety concern and you have a preservation concern almost done so it was funny I think it was there was a talk that described in cannabula with these early materials and I absolutely agree with that I think that these materials will be will be considered in a very different light and in the sort of way we look at book of hours now and it's not just something that we use for prayer it's something that we value in other ways because it speaks to a time that is different from our own similar in some ways but different in others and in the same way that we particularly value books before the age of the printing press and we we value things that are on parchment you describe the people know this wasn't on paper it wasn't in Western Europe yet we don't have notes on parchment it's animal skin it's not paper I think negatives will have a similar kind of thing and an age that's increasingly visual but not particularly used to looking at things in reverse I think that our negative collections will take on value in a way that we can't completely describe and I think it's well worth preserving them not only is that I think more cost effective I think it's also something we we should do just as as responsible stewards so many thanks Debbie and Monique and I started on this nitrate acetate journey a long time ago Peter for just his help with knowing what a good standard is like how to interpret it and just his his encouragement and good humor about things film and non-film Nora and Sarah at the Smithsonian have been very helpful as we've worked together moving our materials and my colleagues at the library some of whom are no longer there but we're at the time Sarah Wagner Donna Collins who's still there at Gin Lewis who helped with making a lot of our boxes and my boss Elmer Eusman who humors me in allowing me to still remain a technical expert in something and I traded the thing that I do so many thanks to everybody and if you have questions this started sort of in 2003 if you have questions and you're concerned about your still picture film contact me I can be helpful I have a lot of experience and and I can put you in contact with people and particularly if you have questions about how to interpret an FPA 40 I'm happy to help and for those of you from foreign places I would gladly take whatever information you have about the various standards or or appendices to your national rules because I would be gladly gladly included in the fact because there are slightly different rules in different places there's a Swedish standard that's that it's quite different than this says basically still picture film isn't as dangerous so I'd like to collect that so if you have it I'd like I'd greatly appreciate it thank you very much