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Comment by grandchild | Hacker News Reader

Once you know that _usually_ people use white cotton gloves when handling museum artifacts, I find it a bit distressing that the person halfway down the article is not wearing any while holding the priceless 700-year-old pages.

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“According to the Library of Congress, wearing gloves while handling antiquarian books may do more harm than good. Portland State University Library Special Collections follows their advice to handle most rare and valuable books with clean, dry hands.”

https://library.pdx.edu/news/the-proper-handling-of-rare-boo...

    "Hands in gloves lack the tactility and manual dexterity of bare hands. Handling a book with gloved hands could lead to accidentally torn pages when the gloves catch on fragile edges, or a dropped book if the gloves prove to be loose or slippery.
    Cotton gloves in particular have a tendency to lift fragments from pages, including pigments. Their fibers can catch in cracks that are invisible to the naked eye, further damaging friable pigments and inks.
    This also means that cotton gloves retain a lot of dirt, making them not so clean after all! In this same vein, gloves cause the hands to sweat, and this moisture can penetrate the gloves to wind up on the books. Ew!"

https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2019/11/21/no-love-for-whit...

Apparently archivists had a realization that clean and dry hands are the most precise for handling delicate objects and that actually mistakes are made with any sort of glove. It's only dealers using white gloves at this point to give a sense of mystique to what they're selling and to give the buyer the sense that only the owner can really touch the object.

To clarify, the use of gloves depends a lot on the item. Books are made to be handled by people and are usually resilient to contact with clean human hands. However there are other museum pieces that are far more sensitive to oil which still merit the use of gloves. For example, here is a video [0] of Adam Savage discussing a piece from the Met Museum which is handled using gloves because they want to preserve it.

[0] https://youtu.be/u_-oUvv28dE

I believe this is no longer encouraged.

From what I understand the gloves are only used on case-by-case basis. For some items they are more damaging than the oils from our (washed and dried) hands.

I feel like you should give the presumption of confidence to the archivist at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Yeah bro I'm sure you know more about handling precious manuscripts than a Cambridge University archivist.

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