Idea: For long-term storage & preservation of rare "treasures" (whether they be museums pieces, library books, national archive documents, or whoever), invest in oxygen-depleted facilities. At low-enough O2, nothing aerobic - be it bacteria, mold, bug, rodent, or whatever - can grow. Most can't even live. Gradual oxidation damage (paper turning yellow then brown, etc.) ceases. And disastrous fires can't happen.

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culi 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

xerophiles can also be anaerobic. Certain Aspergillus can even show certain adaptations for anaerobic conditions. I wonder if we would just be pushing their evolution in that direction

EDIT: Aspergillus penicillioides is mentioned in the article and it can survive in both anaerobic and aerobic conditions

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0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe the real trick is to have sufficient control over the humidity and atmospheric gases so that as soon as a particular fungal species starts to take root, you can change to a different parameter setting which wipes it out.

	▲	moi2388 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t think the art pieces would enjoy that very much either unfortunately

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riwsky 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Damn, wait: you mean the random HN commenter didn’t magically solve a difficult problem that has long-confounded experts, simply by bringing their unique insights and thirty seconds to bear?

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Dave_Rosenthal 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The car guys have done it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stfjVt0AbFU

	▲	arjie 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That was a tremendous video. Cars stored in a robotic nitrogen-filled facility where they can only be retrieved by robots; a two-turbine dyno room; wow. It's wild that places like this exist in the world.

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zdc1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You could potentially seal the gasses within the picture frame; double glazed window style

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giraffe_lady 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From the perspective of an archive, library, or museum preservation isn't really the goal in itself, just a strictly mandatory prerequisite. The pieces have to be made available to researchers (and depending on the institution the public) for the archive to be able to consider itself fulfilling its mission.

There is kind of a cost/preservation/accessibility triangle with curatorial preservation, and museums already normally choose storage that is somewhere other than the most expensive/best preservation corner of that triangle. Oxygen-depleted facilities significantly extend that corner, but if we're already not using what we have there then it may not be a useful addition.

Low-oxygen environments also have their own preservation issues. I'm not actually a museum curator so I don't know the specifics. But it is a very complex and old discipline and they've tried just about everything. The problem is usually funding, which unfortunately boils this whole thing down to another boring "you can't solve social problems with technical solutions."

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baggy_trough 9 hours ago | parent [-]

What is the social problem you refer to?

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saintfire 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Presumably society doesn't deem preservation to be worth any cost.

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autoexec 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are other considerations as well. We could probably preserve works for longer if we kept them sealed away in darkness, but we value these works in part because of what we get by experiencing them. What we get out of them as artistic works makes them worth taking such good care of as opposed to just being something that's really really old.

Society wants to see these things, and learn from them, even though every moment they spend out in the open exposes them to more harms.

We're fortunate that digitizing has come such a long way. We can preserve and even recreate a lot of things long after the physical objects themselves are gone. It's not the same as having the originals, but at a certain point the reproductions are all we'll have left.

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baggy_trough 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's what I was wondering. We can't redirect the entire output of society towards museum conservation, so some tradeoffs will have to be made. That isn't a problem, just reality.

	▲	chasil 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When a large book turns into an epub/zip that is under 100kb, what makes the paper so important? When you add up all the books that were required for our careers, would they be a megabyte? The little that we understand is uncomfortably summarized this way.

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jjmarr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

wouldn't the curators need SCBA gear and airlocks?

Turning museums into a Resident Evil house is a cool idea.

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thaumasiotes 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It will make retrieval challenging and dangerous.