Introduction

In Manchester we are setting up a Centre that will provide a service to all archives and museums dealing primarily with polymer stability. I will start by summarizing the problems that we have to date: we once believed that we could just acquire and save audio-visual collections and amass data; but, once acquired, the collections truly become a nuisance because they have, as a major constituent, polymers. Now all polymers are unstable with time and therefore have a limited life span. So any materials that contain a polymer system will be unstable and will deteriorate, and that includes all current information storage material.