Paper can get damaged by any element quite easily. Water, for one, can cause it to wrinkle, wrap or have stains. When faced with this problem, you should act immediately. There are several ways by which you can restore damaged documents but the first step one should take is document drying.



Document drying, when done within forty eight hours, can lessen the chances of the document suffering more damage including growth of mold. Documents could be dried using either one or a combination of air-drying, dehumidification, and vacuum freeze drying.

As soon as you are sure that you can start restoring your items, take all your documents out into the open. This would allow you to determine which ones can still be saved and which ones are beyond restoration. Make sure that you have gloves on before you start washing away silt that may have remained on your documents. Immediately dispose those documents that are not important and are beyond repair.

If some of your documents are stuck together, do not try to pull them apart. Instead of solving the problem, this could cause even more damage to your document. Put wax paper or plastic in between the pages or sheets in order to absorb excess water and then place it inside a freezer.

If your documents have not sustained heavy damage and you want to go for a cost-effective way of document drying, you can have your documents air-dried. In air drying, you only have to take out the documents from the freezer and put it out on a table where the air could dry them out. When doing this, however, you have to make sure that you have a lot of circulating air; otherwise, mold can grow on your documents.

A slight variation of air-drying is towel-drying. You can do this by putting towel in between the pages or loose sheets of your document. Replace towel when it has become saturated with water and dirt.

Another technique in document drying is dehumidification. This is similar to air-drying and differs only on the source of air. You would need a number of dehumidifiers to carry out this document drying process.

Vacuum freeze drying requires the use of specialized chambers. These chambers force the water in the paper to become vapour without passing through the liquid state. This process is also known as sublimation. These two techniques of document drying are especially helpful when your documents have sustained heavy damage.

Keep in mind however, that books bound with vellum or leather cannot be dried using vacuum thermal drying. These items should be dried slowly and carefully as they have a tendency to shrivel since they are made of animal skin. Do not attempt to open them as this might only cause more damage.

You should note that, no matter how fast you can do document drying, your documents cannot return to their original, pristine condition. As always, calling a document drying specialist is the surest way of restoring your water-damaged documents.