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Pro tip: don't store your field notes in a plastic bag in a hot car
Last summer I left a bag with about 4 months of site notes in a ziplock in my trunk. It got up to probably 120 degrees inside and the moisture from the humidity just cooked the paper. When I opened it the ink had smeared on half the pages and some were stuck together. I spent a whole weekend trying to salvage what I could with a hair dryer and a scanner. Has anyone else had to deal with heat damage on old notebooks or is this just a rookie mistake I should've known better than to make?
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sagep191mo ago
oh man, that is brutal. i had something similar happen with a notebook i left on a windowsill during a heatwave, the glue in the spine just melted and pages started falling out. it's one of those things you don't really think about until it happens, but paper and heat are terrible friends. at least you got some of it back, that's something.
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rowanellis1mo ago
I had something similar with some old sketchbooks that got left in a storage unit during a Texas summer. What actually worked for me was putting the damaged pages in the freezer for a few hours to get the paper cold and brittle, then carefully peeling them apart with a palette knife. After that I pressed them flat under heavy books for a couple days with parchment paper between each page. The freezer trick saved a lot more than I expected, might be worth trying if you still have any stuck pages left. How did you end up organizing the scanned data after you got it all digitized?
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the_angela1mo ago
cooked the paper" is a great way to put it, sounds like you made paper soup in a ziplock. I had a similar thing with a Moleskine that sat in my backpack during a 100 degree day and the cover actually warped, turned into a little paper taco. @sagep19 is right, you don't think about it until your field notes look like a science experiment gone wrong. Freezer trick sounds like a solid Hail Mary, but I just ended up scanning what I could and calling that weekend a free lesson in thermodynamics. Rookie mistake, but at least we all learned that paper and cars are enemies.
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