Document Preservation

To preserve history, one must first save the paper it is written on, and Jane Mueller, a preservation librarian, is an expert in that lonely field. "People don't understand that there are things that can be done to preserve those important documents," said the Buena Park woman, who has mastered the fine art of paper preservation. With modern methods, paper can be preserved indefinitely, Mueller said.

Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together. "Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing. Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together. "Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing. Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Historical government files that chronicle the lives of immigrants in the U.S. will become part of the National Archives instead of being destroyed, officials announced Wednesday. The files could reveal the untold stories of millions of immigrants, including scores of Jews who fled Europe after World War II and Chinese who came to the U.S. as part of the diaspora.

Fifty years after first setting foot in town, Mr. Smith has come to Washington again. The 1939 film classic "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" was among 25 movies cited Tuesday as American movie treasures by the Library of Congress. The move was designed to bring attention to the fragility of the medium and spur wider efforts to protect its finest exemplars. The proposal to designate certain films as "national treasures" grew out of the controversy over colorizing black-and-white films.

Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.

Over the next three months, it is estimated that more than 3.5 million of the nation's 300 million research library books will silently decompose and die as a result of acid contained in their pages. "If you walk in the library there is a distinctive odor, and you know it's the odor of disintegrating books in the stacks," said Scott Bennett, director of the Milton Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University.

ISRAEL MUSEUM'S PRICELESS HOLDINGS, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to works by Renoir and Van Gogh, have been put away for safekeeping. Yards and yards of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the first known biblical texts, lie in a vault with a foot-thick steel door. On the floor are racks of Impressionist and modern paintings. Jerusalem, with its large Arab population, has not been hit by any of Iraq's Scud missile attacks, but the museum is taking no chances.

Robert Aitchison pulls a large box from a drawer in a file cabinet, lifts the lid and reveals the contents: a hardly recognizable clump of crumpled and torn paper. His job--if the client gives him the go-ahead--will be to take that mess of paper and restore it so that it can be used in a court of law. The paper is the ship's log from an oil-drilling vessel that sank in the South China Sea and may be used as evidence in a lawsuit resulting from the disaster.

REMEMBER when comic books were considered too juvenile to be read? Now it appears that they have become too valuable to be touched. A company in Sarasota, Fla., has created a sensation among collectors by taking their comic books, both rare vintage issues and brand-new ones, and encasing them in plastic slabs that make them both unreadable and instantly more valuable. The Captain Marvel and Donald Duck comic books that arrive at the offices of the Certified Guaranty Co.

Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.

REMEMBER when comic books were considered too juvenile to be read? Now it appears that they have become too valuable to be touched. A company in Sarasota, Fla., has created a sensation among collectors by taking their comic books, both rare vintage issues and brand-new ones, and encasing them in plastic slabs that make them both unreadable and instantly more valuable. The Captain Marvel and Donald Duck comic books that arrive at the offices of the Certified Guaranty Co.

In Chinatown's Central Plaza, elderly men sit on benches sipping milk tea, old women nosily shuffle mah-jongg tiles and cooks clack metal spatulas against their woks, filling the air with the pungent aroma of ginger and garlic. Overlooking this scene is a white, three-story building guarded by a pair of stone lions. Venturing up the building's darkened stairway to the top floor is like entering a time capsule that tells the history of Chinatown and the community that grew from it.

It all comes down to touch. David and Marsha Karpeles sift through their collection of yellowing documents and think about the people who first handled them and about the faded but still vibrant words they wrote. There's Pope Lucius III as he gave instructions to his knights on the eve of the Third Crusade. Thomas Jefferson as he gave voice to a young nation's dreams for itself. Abraham Lincoln as he ended legal slavery in the midst of the Civil War.

Culminating a lengthy legal battle, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office has agreed to preserve indefinitely all files dealing with death penalty cases or cases that result in life sentences, according to settlement documents obtained Wednesday by The Times. Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley also agreed to preserve all felony files for at least 25 years and all misdemeanor files for five years.

Guillermo Sheridan had a bitter smile as he scrolled down the list of acquisitions by Princeton University: The papers of Carlos Fuentes, Miguel Angel Asturias, Julio Cortazar, Elena Garro--even a lesser known Mexican poet named Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano. "We Mexicans always sell our raw materials," he remarked acidly, stopping at Ortiz's name on his computer screen. "Coffee, copper--and this."

It's that dreaded time of the year again: tax season. And if you're knee-deep in papers that need to be sorted, you're stuck with a nasty, time-consuming task. Why not get organized now for next year? But which important papers and records to keep and which to toss? And where and how long to keep them? "The first thing is to try to take a more organized approach than most people do," said Tom Gau of Kavesh & Gau, a financial planning and tax preparation firm in Torrance.

Twenty-five American films, ranging from the Walt Disney 1940 classic "Fantasia" to the obscure 1943 18-minute "Meshes of the Afternoon," have been chosen for protection as film treasures for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. This is the second group of films tabbed for historic preservation under the terms of the 1988 National Film Preservation Act, which allows the registry to honor 25 films every year that are deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

In an Ethiopian mountaintop monastery. In a stable on the island of Malta. In the ancestral castle of a German prince. In every remnant of our medieval past, the manuscripts are sought. They are wrinkled, some of them, and smudged--page after ancient page of parchment scribbled in a cramped and crabby script. Others are gorgeous, afire with art, shimmering with golden ink. They may tell of St. George slaying the dragon. Or relate a recipe for stew. They may tote up a carouser's debt.

More than 22,000 ancient manuscripts from the archives of a Greek Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos in Thessaloniki, Greece, will be digitally copied by the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center at Claremont Graduate University. The center, which said it pioneered the use of digital imaging technologies on the deteriorated Dead Sea Scrolls, reached agreement with the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies in Greece to undertake the project.