What is Archival Quality in Scrapbooking?

"So you're watching Expert Village and today we're doing scrapbooking and my guest Sonia here is going to teach us how to get started. She's going to teach us all about archival quality. Archival quality. What's that Sonia? Well basically archival quality is making sure that the materials you use for your scrapbooking are photo safe. Now unfortunately a lot of older scrapbooks are made with materials that have actually destroyed your photos and destroyed memorabilia and it's tragic because you think you're doing something good, you want to preserve your memories and then you turn to them a few years later; they're yellow, they're starting to discolor and it's really sad. So we've got an example of a scrapbook here like that. This one isn't that old, it's from the 1970s, you can already see the yellow on the pages, the yellow is starting to effect the quality of the pictures, it can break down the photo material and the photos can actually disintegrate. Really and so it can completely destroy the photos? Destroy the photos, I just worked on a project for someone and things were just crumpling and we were afraid to touch it really to help preserve it because it was just crumpling. Oh my goodness, cause the acid eats it away? Right, the acid eats it away just like acid would, there's also chemicals called legmen, those are in the papers. Even the magnetic, you know the magnetic is so easy because you just pulled off the plastic and you stuck it on. The plastic was bad, the sticky was bad, it was all bad. So now you need to make sure that everything is acid free, legmen free if possible, buffered; buffer is to neutralize the acid and we have a product called archival mist. Nice. It's a spray can that is very easy to use, you just give it a good shake, you spray it on things that you want to preserve, it's great for newspaper clippings; that sort of thing, they have a high acid content. You're going to be able to either prevent the aging process due to acid or stop it in its traps. Like if you have an old album like this one and you want to preserve it you just peel this off and you spray the archival mist right? But you're going to want to peel this off, you're going to want to get the pictures, everything out of the albums as soon as possible. Even if you're not able to scrap them right away, you need to get them out of there and get them into something that is photo safe, photo safe storage box, that sort of thing. Immediately? Immediately. So you want to spray the photos with the archival mist? Spray the photos with the archival mist, spray any memorabilia, clippings, newspaper clippings, reports, certificates, anything like that. Great, okay so remember; take the pictures out, spray them and start a new scrapbook. Right, start a new scrapbook. So we're going to talk about that next. That's what we're going to do. Fantastic!"