Hello again Helen, I have now had another chat with my husband.  The shelf life of photocopy paper depends on where it was manufactured. Australian photocopy paper is naturally acidic as clay is used as a filler and our clay is acidic. In fact he said that their tests of accelerated ageing gave a half life of just 1 year to the photocopy paper (that is without any toner or ink etc). In that time the paper lost half its properties such as ability to resist tearing and its tensile strength. After 20 years of accelerated aging the paper disintergrated into dust when handled. Most English some European and some American photocopy papers are naturally "basic" rather than "acidic" because they use chalk or calcium carbonate as their fillers. Primarially because that is what they have locally.  This means that those papers are naturally archival and will last for decades. So it depends on the location of the paper mill as to the local resources it uses for fillers that determine the shelf life of the paper and in Australia we are rather short on chalk and have plenty of clay. So our paper degrades faster. Hopefully that is all understandable and gives you an explanation as to why it is happening. I realise that it is not good news. However it does mean that you now can think around the problem and look at solutions.  Remember that CDs also degrade and have a projected life of just 5 years as well. There are archival cds available however they are very expensive. As others have suggested, scanning and saving to a hard drive may be the way to go as long as you remember to do independant backups onto a seperate hard drive. Good luck Tia ----- Original Message ---- From: Helen Kenney <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, 14 August, 2008 11:22:12 PM Subject: Photocopies Our historical society relies on photocopies for many of our records and we have just discovered that some of them are deteriorating despite being kept in acid free pockets and limited exposure to sun light. Are we going to end up looking at blank paper or is there something that we can do to stop the breakdown? A lot of the copies have come from the PRO, maybe it is the way that they can keep making an income causing us to come back and pay again for copies. Helen ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message Win a MacBook Air or iPod touch with Yahoo!7. http://au.docs.yahoo.com/homepageset