Reports and technical notes
everything the centre finds, including the null results

Technical notes

Short, single-question pieces, four to twelve pages, written for the person who has to make a decision this month. Each is dated and superseded rather than silently edited.

No.	Title	Issued	Status
9	Reading pH results from cold extraction without overstating them	2026	Current
8	Tape lifts for mould: sampling, transport and what culture adds	2025	Current
7	Photographing a leaf in transmitted light for perforation counts	2025	Current
6	Loggers on shelves: placement, calibration drift and reading the record	2024	Current
5	Interpreting colourimetry on discoloured paper	2023	Current
4	Bathophenanthroline: what a positive result licenses	2022	Superseded by no. 9 in part
3	Sampling from tear edges without creating new loss	2021	Current

Guidance

Guidance notes are written with a working group drawn from partner archives, and are the only documents here that recommend rather than report.

• Surface cleaning: what the evidence supports (2025) — six materials tested for gloss change, colour change and abrasion; two of them should not be in general use.
• Triage in a wetting incident: the first seventy-two hours (2024).
• Specifying an environmental survey (2023) — what to ask a contractor for, and how to tell whether you got it.
• Handling and support for bound volumes under digitisation (2022).

Publication policy

Programme results are published whether or not they support the hypothesis the programme opened with. Three of the six current programmes have produced null or negative findings, and those are written up at the same length as the positive ones. A field that only prints results which worked will slowly fill with methods that do not.

Commissioned reports belong to the institution that commissioned them and are not published by us. Aggregated, anonymised measurements may enter a programme dataset unless the submitting institution opts out, which a small number do each year, and that is recorded in the dataset documentation as a known gap rather than quietly ignored.