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such as music and literature. An art form is allographic
if the most exact duplication is considered genuine.
Conversely, it is not allographic, but autographic,
when the most exact duplication cannot be considered
genuine. For example, a copy of a Rembrandt painting
cannot be considered an authentic Rembrandt, but a
reprint of Shakespearean poem is an authentic poem
by Shakespeare. This clearly shows that digital
artefacts and material works of art belong to different
categories, and there are practical consequences in the
way we can preserve them. For a piece of autographic
art, authenticity rests in the material object itself. This
is the reason why we have to preserve the object. We
assign a probative value to the materiality of an object
that, as a last resort, may serve to justify its authenticity.
For allographic art, where each copy is genuine, it
logically ensues that this concept of authenticity is
meaningless. To avoid this ambiguity, it is appropriate
to consider a digital document as we would an
immaterial datum or a sequence of numbers, that is
embodied in any new recording, on condition that it be
authentic, using the primary definition of authenticity,
i.e., “Authenticity implies unabridged conformity with
a verbatim original.” As R. Lemaire (17) sums it up,
a message is authentic if it its transmitted unaltered,
down to its nuances, from a sender to a recipient.
All these changes that we have experienced in the
museum collections, brought about by industrial
development and ranging from tangible artefacts
to time-based objects, also occurred in a similar
manner to conservation and restoration practice.
The impact of industrial
development on conservation
practice
The conservation field did not resist the lure of
modernity and industrial development. At first,
this enthusiasm has led to the negligence of
necessary precautions, assuming that chemistry
and its industrial development would be capable of
providing modern and efficient solutions to solve
some conservation issues (18). Synthetic polymers
are, without a doubt, among the materials which
have enjoyed rapid acceptance in the conservation
field, for example: cellulose acetate, soluble nylon,
polyurethane foam, and PVC. From the 1950s,
Keynote speech
the use of new types of varnishes, adhesives,
and consolidants spread among cultural heritage
professionals. Pesticides and fungicides developed
for agro-food were widely applied to collections.
Over time, many of these treatments have proved
disastrous for several reasons: lack of compatibility,
lack of permanence, damage to artefacts, toxicity,
and so on. It took a few decades to realise the
extent of such damage, and to establish a more
careful approach through the education of museum
professionals. Alongside these new materials, the
mechanization of certain treatments for restoration
has been introduced. Equipment for lamination,
leaf-casting, and paper splitting have been made
available, sometimes opening up discussion in
terms of the integrity of the work, even though
the new apparatus only replicate what the restorer
had been doing manually. The important inputs of
industrial development are the mass treatments.
They rely on advances in chemistry and physics to
treat large volumes of artefacts without the need to
treat them individually. Some of these techniques
are derived from food industries. The most frequent
mass treatments are freeze-drying for drying flooded
and frozen paper documents, gamma radiation or
ethylene oxide for disinfection or disinfestations,
and mass deacidification.
Let us take the example of mass deacidification: it
is crucial to take diverse parameters into account
for this conservation treatment, which depends not
only on technical performance but also on societal
choices. Mass deacidification has been the subject of
intense research since the 1970s. At this time, society
was very confident in chemical treatments. To
handle hundreds of books simultaneously with their
bindings, it was necessary to develop appropriate
techniques. Weit’o process was introduced in North
America in the 1970’s. The books were introduced
into an autoclave and subjected to a mixture of
alcohol, chlorofluorocarbon and methoxy methyl
carbonate magnesium. The archives of Canada
(1981) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
(1987) were equipped with such deacidification
units. In Houston, Texas, a deacidification plant
based on the use of diethyl zinc or “DEZ” was
constructed for the Library of Congress, but was later
discontinued in 1994. Many other mass treatments
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