When choosing best mounting practices, it’s good to know what these archival standards are, even if you choose not to follow them.Ī good resource for archival guidelines can be found on the United States Library of Congress website. Preserving your Images for the AgesĪrchival is a word used to identify techniques that are designed to preserve your work for as long as we know how to make it last-for the archives, as it were.

Good professional framing shops use Museum Rag mat board as a standard. Museum Rag is next, made 100% of cotton, used for maximum protection. Next up is rag mat board, made with cotton in its core. This category has the widest range of colors and is the least expensive. This can offer a nice visual contrast for certain images. Within this category, the majority of choices have a cream-colored core, but a subcategory offers a black core, and occasionally, other colors in the core. The most popular is acid-neutralized board, where chemicals infused into the boards are supposed to buffer the acids so no damage happens. To choose correctly, it’s important to know that there are several types of mat boards sold. This blog entry focuses on mounting others will address printing, framing/display and storage options and best choices. In response to these types of damages, standards for archival print creation, mounting, display, and storage have been defined. Worse yet, the acids will leach into an image underneath it, and stain the image. This one is not acid-free, and over time, it will turn brown. The mat below is newer, and might or might not be acid-free you can’t tell simply by looking. The mat shown above has a brown core, indicating the paper was not acid-free. Many photographers learned they needed these special approaches the hard way, discovering their older prints and mats were browning, staining and decomposing from incorrect mounting (and framing).

If you’d like to sell your work, have your work last for the ages, or display it to best advantage, you’ll need some specific information about techniques for mounting, so that you can hand your work on to successive generations.

If your work is for yourself alone, you can do what you please mount, or don’t mount, it’s up to you. What’s the best way to do these things? The answer is “It depends.”

Art rag