Magnolia zenii Cheng. 'Pink Parchment'

Inside the Parchment

Even though parchment has been applied as library and archive substrate for centuries, this material’s structure and degradation patterns are less explored than paper’s ones. In this preliminary work vibrational studies highlighting distinction between parchment components are presented. Advances in conservation methods can in fact be achieved by an improved knowledge of the microscopic and spe...

Goal(yellow) Green Green Pink Pink Pink Pink Pink Yellow Yellow Field(green)

Ken Cheng

Ken Cheng was born in Hong Kong. His family emigrated to Toronto, Canada while he was still young, and he attended high school in Toronto, and then the University of Toronto. He has a M.Ed. from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA in 1984. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Sussex and at the University of Western Ontario before beco...

Autoxidation of Lipids in Parchment

Historic parchment is a macromolecular material, which is complex due to its natural origin, inhomogeneity of the skin structure, unknown environmental history and potential localised degradation. Most research into its stability has so far focussed on thermal and structural methods of analyses. Using gas-chromatographic analysis of the atmosphere surrounding parchment during oxidation, we prov...

Multispectral Imaging of Degraded Parchment

Multispectral imaging was employed to collect data on the degradation of an 18 century parchment by a series of physical and chemical treatments. Each sample was photographed before and after treatment by a monochrome digital camera with 21 narrow-band filters, with the objective of assessing algorithms for recovery of text from the images. A template-matching technique was used to detect the c...