As a smaller part of Creighton's project to document the artifacts from St. John's Church, we uncovered some 19th century folded documents that would need to be unfolded before they could be scanned for the digital repository. Being well over 100 years old, written with volatile iron gall ink, previously damaged by water at an unknown date, and being stored in the non-climate controlled and humid vault of the church, the documents were extremely fragile and laced with iron gall ink corrosion.

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Since the documents were already damaged and deteriorating, their digital preservation was deemed a priority, necessitating a means of carefully unfolding the documents in an ad hoc humidification chamber so that they could be laid flat.

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With some cautious initial trials of the humidification chamber, we were eventually able to gently unfold and flatten the fragile documents without any cracking or flaking of the brittle paper so that they could be scanned and digitally preserved.