Mass deacidification is a term used in library and information science as one possible measure against the degradation of paper in old books, the so-called "slow fires".
[3] Supported in part by grants from the Council on Library Resources, William J. Barrow conducted research into paper decay and found that no more than three percent of books published between 1900 and 1949 would survive more than fifty years.
[5] In addition to Barrow's original method, both non-aqueous—employing organic solvents—and vaporous—the Library of Congress' DEZ (diethyl zinc) treatment—methods of achieving the same results have been researched in an attempt to reduce time, labor, and cost requirements.
Eventually, explosives were used to rupture the suspect plumbing; suspicions of the presence of residual DEZ were confirmed by the subsequent fire that destroyed the plant.
These are the results that the Library of Congress expected of an ideal mass deacidification treatment in 1994: Faculty members of the Slovak University of Technology added these further requirements: All of the processes imparted an adequately high pH in studies conducted by the European Commission on Preservation and Access, the Library of Congress, and a team of scientists from the Centre de Recherches sur la Conservation des Documents Graphiques in the early and mid-nineties.
"[16] Conservators from the British Library acknowledge that the existing mass deacidification processes are still being developed and further research needs to be conducted on their chemical and mechanical effects.
The United States' National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which pioneered an aqueous technique that improved upon Barrow's, chose to invest its preservation dollars elsewhere.
[5] In 2000, the Chief of the NARA Document Conservation Laboratory defended the lack of a mass deacidification program by pointing to differences between library and archival collections.
[28] Finally, a 2003 cost comparison with reformatting options per volume yielded $125 for microfilming, $50 for scanning and minimal indexing and, based on a New York Public Library project, $16.20 for deacidification.