DHPS Tips 2025 Wrapped Boxed
What did your playlists look like in 2025? If you’re a Spotify (or Apple Music, or YouTube Music) listener, you’ve probably already scrolled through this year’s “Wrapped”-style recap of your most-played tracks. Last year, we joined the fun with 2024 DHPS Tips Wrapped, rounding up the preservation posts that got the most reads.
This year, we’re staying in our lane and going all-in on one of our favorite preservation tools: the archival box. Instead of songs on a playlist, think of this as DHPS Tips 2025 Boxed, five blog posts you can “pack” into your mental record carton for future reference. Whether you’re wrestling with housekeeping, grappling with light levels, or brushing up on core terminology, these are the posts we reached for again and again in 2025.
1. Handle With Care
DHPS Tips | The Great Glove Debate: Best Practices for Handling Cultural Heritage Objects
Gloves or no gloves? This post walks through the pros and cons of cotton, nitrile, and bare hands, helping you decide what to use based on material type, risk to the object, and risk to the handler. It also highlights sustainability considerations, encouraging institutions to balance preservation, safety, and environmental impact when they write or update handling guidelines.
2. The Fine Art of Dust Removal
DHPS Tips: Dusting vs. Vacuuming in Collections Care
Housekeeping is more than just appearances: this piece explains how dust contributes to mold growth, corrosion, pest activity, and gradual surface damage, especially on paper, photographs, textiles, and painted surfaces. You’ll find practical guidance on when gentle dusting is safest, when a HEPA-filtered vacuum is the better tool, and how to integrate both into a collections-focused housekeeping plan that keeps artifacts clean without putting them at risk.
3. Decoding Preservation Lingo
DHPS Tips: 3 Ways to Use the New CCAHA Preservation Glossary in Your Work
Preservation jargon can feel like a never-ending avalanche of unfamiliar terms: off-gassing, inherent vice, buffering, and more. This post introduces CCAHA’s free, image-rich Preservation Glossary and offers three concrete ways to use it: decoding language in reports and plans, supporting staff and intern training, and building a shared institutional vocabulary for grants, board communication, and policy work. It’s a great reference to keep “on top of the box” for anyone new to collections care or long-time practitioners who want a quick refresher.
4. Under the (Correct) Spotlight
DHPS Tips: A Practical Guide to Measuring Light in Collections
Light is essential for access and exhibits, but it’s also one of the most damaging forces we expose collections to over time. This guide demystifies lux, UV, and light meters, explaining how to interpret readings and set realistic targets for exhibition, storage, and workspaces. It emphasizes tracking cumulative exposure, not just “how bright it looks,” and offers actionable tips for adjusting lighting, rotating sensitive materials, and using data to advocate for preservation-minded exhibit design.
5. A is for Access (and Acid-Free)
DHPS Tips: An Archival Alphabet Soup of “A” Words
From access copy to accession, archival to arrangement, authenticity to authority, this playful post dives into a whole boxful of “A-words” that shape archival work. By unpacking both the preservation and access implications of terms like accessible and archival, it reminds us that storing collections in boxes is only half the job, building inclusive, usable systems for people to discover and engage with them is just as important. It’s part glossary, part pep talk, and a fun way to revisit foundational concepts.
Together, these five posts touch on many of the everyday decisions that keep collections safe in their boxes and beyond: how we handle objects, clean spaces, talk about preservation, manage light, and define the work we do. We hope you’ll (re)visit them, bookmark your favorites, and share them with colleagues, volunteers, and board members as you plan for the year ahead.
Do you have a preservation topic, question, or creative solution you’d like to see “boxed up” in a future DHPS Tips post? We’d love to hear from you at info@dhpsny.org, on the DHPSNY Facebook page, or in the DHPSNY Community Facebook Group. Here’s to another year of keeping New York’s collections safe, stable, and ready for the future—lid on, labels clear, and boxes neatly on the shelf.