According to my husband who used to work as a research assistant in R&D for APM, photocopy paper has a shelf life of less than 10 years before the paper itself begins to degrade. Application of toner etc will hasten the degradation process (Recycled paper degrades faster BTW).  They did do test runs on archival quality photocopy paper which had a 100 year life span before begining to degrade but I don't believe that there was enough commercial demand (it was more expensive to make) so most of it was re pulped. That was at least 15 years ago. So if the PRO is using recycled paper - as a lot of buisnesses do to save money and be "green" then yes they would degrade reasonably quickly over time. The "normal" photocopy paper would also degrade just not quite as quickly, and the PRO would not even be aware of this side effect. Hope this helps 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