Conservation laboratories

The main advantage of wholesale climate control Hes in easy access to the objects, and the absence of differences in conditions between various spaces within the institution, eg, storage areas, conservation laboratories, and exhibition galleries. The actual values set for the rh are a matter of compromise metals, stone, and ceramics are best served by humidities as low as possible, but organic materials generally require higher values. An accepted... 

For different types of collections, this balance is differently defined. For example paper conservation treatments commonly undertaken in the museum conservation laboratory would be impractical in a Hbrary archive having a far greater collection size. The use of treatments for mass paper quantities would be unacceptable in the art museum. Documents in archives and books in Hbraries serve a different goal from art objects in a museum. Their use value Hes primarily in their information rather than in an intrinsic esthetic value. Whereas optimal preservation of that information value requires preservation of the object itself, a copy or even a completely different format could serve the same purpose. 

Mills, J. S. (1972), Identification of organic materials in museum objects, in Conservation in the Tropics, Proc. Asia-Pacific Seminar on Conservation of Cultural Property, International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cul and Central Conservation Laboratory, New Delhi, pp. 159-170. 

Soils. Granite Reef soil is a sandy loam soil, supplied by the U.S. Water Conservation Laboratory, USDA, Phoenix, AZ. Walla Walla soil is a soil which contains 30% clay and organic matter, supplied by the Columbia Plateau Conservation Research Center, USDA, Pendleton, OR. 

Analytical Errors. Errors associated with these data arise from uncertainties in the analytical methods and from impurities introduced into or present in the ivory matrix. These added materials are either inorganic salts from groundwater replacing collagenous matter during burial or organic material used in the conservation laboratory to impregnate friable specimens. 

Meredith Montague, Assistant Conservator, Materials Conservation Laboratory, Texas Memorial Museum, carried out the replication of the experiments done with the vacuum suction table, and completed the treatment of the unnumbered tapa from the University s Department of Textiles and Clothing. 

Print and Drawing Conservation Laboratory, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. 02115... 

Print and Drawing Conservation Laboratory, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, Calif. 98121... 

Work Areas. The fabrics storeroom should not be combined with the curators office, the study room, the conservation laboratory, or the maintenance workers room, so as to avoid exposing the collection to unnecessary light and changes in atmospheric conditions caused by people going in and out, as well as to lessen casual touching of fabrics. 

Photochemical damage occurs whenever fabrics are exposed to light of any strength or any type. Such damage, whether to fiber or dyes, is not easily recognizable during the course of daily maintenance since it occurs slowly. Once inflicted, however, the effect is often so severe that the fabric cannot be revitalized by conservation laboratory work. Therefore, fabrics must be stored in pitch darkness and their exposure to light restricted to study, conservation work, and limited exhibition only. 

Once these conditions are met, further testing is needed to determine the long-term effects of the treatment. Short-term improvements are not acceptable at the cost of accelerated degradation later. Thus, any material that satisfies the initial criteria must receive more stringent evaluation before it can be recommended for use in the conservation laboratory. 

NEDCC is located in Abbot Hall on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It is the only regional center in the country specifically oriented to conservation of library and archival materials as opposed to museum collections. Having begun life in the basement of the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, we are pleased that we now have windows on all four sides. We have a large, spacious paper conservation laboratory, and specialized equipment such as our Israeli-made leaf caster. This is used to fill losses in book pages or documents and to reinforce crumbled edges. 

A group of early European and American papers covering the period 1770 to 1900, supplied by the National Archives conservation laboratory (Table VI), and a group of papers made by Thomas Amies of Philadelphia, 1770-1840, and now in the Winterthur Library, were analyzed in this study. Thomas Gravell determined the dates of the papers from their watermarks according to his recently published book (4). 

This study was funded in part by a grant from the National Museum Act and by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. A recent grant from the National Science Foundation will support additional work that will be under the guidance of the conservation laboratories of The Library of Congress, the National Archives, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Winterthur Museum. 

Once it is ascertained that a consolidant meets the original criteria of increasing tensile and tearing strength (or at least not decreasing them) while maintaining hand and flexibility and that the application process will not harm the fabric, it will be possible, and necessary, to address the questions of long term effects of treatment with the material. Only when this final characteristic is known will a consolidant be considered for use in the textile conservation laboratory. 

A STANDARD IS NOT AN END PRODUCT but a vehicle to assist records keepers in achieving the principal mission of their organizations, namely, to preserve information and to make this information available to others. The object of this chapter is to emphasize the need for records organizations to direct some of the efforts of their research and conservation laboratories toward the development of standards for records materials, to develop those standards in cooperation with a recognized standards organization, and to devise an improved mechanism for making use of specifications. 

The data and concepts developed from research are useless to the records keeper unless they are translated into action. Examples of this action are a written procedure that can be used in the conservation laboratory and a specification that describes a product to be purchased for use in restoration. Some standards in the form of specifications for paper, laminating film, and photographic film are available. Standard procedures, developed in cooperation with a recognized U.S. standards organization for use in conservation laboratories, are not available. 

Objects, including large guns, were recovered from the sea prior to the formation of the Mary Rose Trust in 1979, and they were taken to the conservation laboratories of the City Museum the same day. Close planning and liaison with the people providing equipment to lift the guns from the wreck site and take them ashore, the road transport and the museum staff were essential. Once the operation became full-time in 1979, the Mary Rose Trust, a charity and a company limited by guarantee, was formed to excavate and, if feasible and... 

A conservation laboratory equipped to deal with finds had functioned at the Trust headquarters at Portsmouth since 1979, and the external Advisory Committees met regularly to review progress and monitor the work as it progressed. In 1982 a suitable dock in the Royal Naval Base was equipped to receive the hull while it was cleaned, restored and conserved. The salvage plans and a detailed research programme to define passive and active conservation techniques went on concurrently with the excavation offshore between 1980 and 1982. 

The first priority is to keep the artefact wet immediately it is brought to the surface. If the object is very small and shows little evidence of corrosion, it may be placed in an airtight container along with a desiccant such as silica gel. In the absence of nearby conservation laboratories, totally immerse the artefact in seawater or preferably freshwater. Corrosion of any remaining metal will... 

If there is a conservation laboratory nearby, immerse the artefact straight away in an electrolyte, which passivates any exposed metal. The pH can be ascertained from the relevant E-pH diagram for the metal concerned and examples for ferrous artefacts would be 0.5 M sodium hydroxide, 0.2 M sodium sesquicarbonate or 0.5 M sodium carbonate. 

Degraded wood can be quite tricky to section. The micrographs shown are typical of what can be obtained in a conservation laboratory where microscopy is only one of many occupations. 

The hull underwent preservation treatment from 1962 until 1979 in its dockyard housing. The disconnected pieces have been preserved in tanks in a specially built conservation laboratory. 

During 1961 a conservation laboratory was built to care for the disconnected Wasa finds. A staff was hired to do the preservation work I joined the group as a chemist. The new head of the Wasa preservation effort, civil engineer Lars Barkman, became secretary to the board of specialists. 

Treatments Considered. The board of specialists had to consider many products that were suggested for use as preservatives. PEG is not toxic to fungi. Therefore, if PEG was going to be used, either the archaeological material had to be treated with fungicide prior to the PEG treatment or fungicide should be dissolved along with PEG in the conservation solution. The latter treatment was recommended, and my first task at the conservation laboratory was to develop such a solution. 

Predictable set characteristics are also important to process control. Predictability of set is often a factor of application environment (humidity, temperature) and material purity. The prevalence of unstable and contaminated monomers in conservation laboratories (possibly a result of the infrequency of consolidation treatments) can be a significant problem, as incomplete polymerization and retarded transition can occur. 

Varying Concerns. Conservators concerns tend to lie in preservation of objects of value, rather than in analysis of wood or a better understanding of the process of wood deterioration. Conservators often deal with one-of-a-kind objects that require immediate attention in order to continue to exist as objects of interest. Therefore, conservators feel that they need to have highly reliable preservation methods available to them. The situational dynamic of conservation emphasizes the use of low-risk established techniques in the production of preserved objects rather than research into degradation processes or methods of preservation, a situation that tends to inhibit basic research in conservation laboratories. 

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