Good evening historians! I'm a volunteer over at a small museum. The place is not significantly funded and is only run by volunteers. Most of the volunteers are elderly and do not have any experience in historical preservation. I have been volunteering there for the past two months and I've mostly done labor work. I have a Bachelors and a Masters in History but I have not ever worked at a museum before. I'm in the military so I have very, very little free time or money to invest in supplies and research since I am working 15 - 16 hour work days. I have looked up some of this stuff online and I have some basic ideas, but I'm looking for some "quick knowledge".
There are some cool paper documents sitting around that I'd like to preserve and display. Some have already been subjected to inappropriate amounts of humidity and/or light and have degraded. Recently, a donor brought in a book with two folded up documents from 1885 and 1890. I was sort of horrified that they were just folded up and shoved into a book. The documents appear to my untrained eye to be original and are in fairly good condition. I'd like to keep things that way.
It seems that light control, humidity control, and pH control are all important here. I finally got to look into the library/archives of the museum, and there's a lot of paper things that are already suffering from various degrees of degredation. Some of this stuff I'd like to display, and all of it I'd like to preserve. Neither the museum or myself have the funds for expensive cases or such, but I imagine there's gotta be a way to protect this stuff. Please help me out, fellow historians!
I think the cheapest things you can really get are some archival folders that you can put documents in like the one you mentioned. You would also need archival boxes to put the folders in. This would get them out of the light, and should help stop any acidic elements from acting on them.
But you can't really do much about the humidity unless you got them into a nicely climate controlled facility (which isn't the sort of thing a museum without much of a budget generally has). Good humidity control is something museums with $500,000 budgets have problems with.
One thing I will mention is the possibility of small grants. Oftentimes state historical societies or state humanities organizations offer small grants (as little as $500 or a few thousand), that can be used for artifact/archive storage supplies. Here is one from the National Endowment for the Humanities where 32% of the grant requests they received were funded. They have examples on the right, and instructions. Writing a grant takes a while, but a lot of it is just background info that can be used for further grants in the future.
Lastly, join us on /r/MuseumPros, we'd love to have a dedicated individual like you. Feel free to ask any more questions here, or over in MuseumPros and we'd be happy to help!
Okay so, I'll just repeat what /u/Eistean says, and that the two cheapest things to control are light and acid, and you just cannot control humidity effectively with a $0 budget. I've worked at an archives that did use consumer-level (household) dehumidifiers in a limited level, so if you're struggling with a really bad humidity problem, maybe give them a go, but they are generally not rated to run as much as a professional one. Also one caught on fire one time D:
Light control is really as easy as not displaying paper objects, and keeping them in their boxes. I don't like to display originals more than a few months, due to light exposure. Rotate them for preservation and keeping the displays fresh and interesting, or put out "surrogates" aka scans. If you have paper displayed under light try to buy the UV filters for the bulbs, they're like a plastic tube that slides over the big florescents.
What's the size of your collection in cubic feet? Archival folders are priced around this, so, depending on size, you can folder your collection properly for a couple hundred. Don't mess with any "archival" folders from non-archives suppliers, like Office Max-Depot, "archival" is not a legally controlled term, you can sell "archival quality cheese" if you want, you'll be wasting your money. Add archival boxes if you can afford them, but if you can only afford one, go with the folders, they can absorb some of the acid from the boxes.
I'll echo what /u/Eistean said about grants, but take a look at state-level ones too, they're less competitive and less people apply for them.