Welcome to the Digital Print Preservation Portal, a part of the DP3 Project. This website is the result of extensive research into the long-term care of digitally printed materials that was performed by the Image Permanence Institute with the help from grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The intention of this website is to provide collection care professionals with the information, skills, and tools they need to ensure the survival of their digitally printed materials. Because this site is intended to be a didactic and not just a reference, it is designed with a curriculum structure. Each of the following menu headings contains what can be considered a lesson that becomes a building block for the next section:
- Technologies – explanations of the major digital printing technologies
- Identification – methods for identifying the various digital print types to ensure accurate care for each object type
- Deterioration – descriptions of the forces of deterioration and their manifestations in digital print collections materials
- Preservation – strategies to mitigate damage to the various digital print types for each of the decay forces
The final section, Resources, provides links to supplementary materials that can help the user more fully understand digital printing technologies or lead them to complimentary materials that can expand their knowledge of broader collection issues and how to integrate digital print collections into their current catalogues of traditionally printed materials or other collection asset types.
The Image Permanence Institute, part of RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, is a university-based, non-profit research laboratory devoted to scientific research in the preservation of visual and other forms of recorded information. It is the world’s largest independent laboratory with this specific scope.
