Parchment damage assessment: a review of methods, multimodal workflows, and a transparent reporting framework

Parchment damage assessment underpins the care of heritage materials, yet practice lacks shared standards for method choice and reporting measurement context. We reviewed 113 studies that applied visual, imaging, spectroscopy, thermal, X-ray, and chemical/biological approaches. There is variability in how techniques are described, and use of terms like ‘invasive’/‘destructive’ without definition obscures differences in contact, restraint, sampling and exposure. We propose a reporting framework linking acquisition parameters to measurement checks.