Preserving Your Family Heirlooms

I am pleased to uh introduce you to Elise Lacon she came down from Gainesville and she's the registrar and the assistant department chair at the Florida history our Florida museum of natural history and she is going to do a program on presenting our family heirlooms and she will include metal objects Ceramics glass artwork textiles books and papers and photographic material and also audio visual material usually everybody has a few family heirlooms that they'd like to keep and I think that she will give you some excellent information and some great pointers on how to so what I want to do tonight is we we treat our objects at museums in certain ways to preserve them our

goal is to preserve them in perpetuity is what we say and that means for a long long time but there are things you can do the same things or similar things to take care of your own objects that you want to last for generations and you want to pass down in your family so what I've done is I've brought some samples of the materials that we use but that you can also order yourself and I was talking with some of the ladies a little earlier a lot of the catalogs that I brought you can order small quantities you don't have to order in bulk like we do so I don't like to bring things that

aren't available to you or that you can't order in small enough quantities for your own use um you'll I'll be here after I finish talking and you can come up to the table I will also talk take questions when I finish if you have if you're confused about something that I'm talking about or if you have general questions please feel free to stop me during the presentation if you've brought an object or you have an object a particular object to talk about hold that to the end so that we can really talk about it in detail um so the first thing um we all have objects that we collect most of us have things that

we are special to us that have come down to us from our grandparents or our great-grandparents um or other people in our families and they're special to us for various reasons um they may have belonged to a person that's special to you but it may be something about the place or the time that it came from or the memories and the history that that object evokes it's Beauty it's worth sometimes people collect things because of their value their monetary value but there's a lot of personal reasons that are specific to us to us personally individually well we can't stop time and we can't stop the natural deterioration of objects and but we can slow it

down if we take proper care and protective measures to keep these um to take care of the objects over time and if you take care of your objects properly it will save you the cost of having to do expensive conservation treatment or losing the object altogether there are several dis different what we call agents of deterioration and you need to have a basic understanding of these forces of deterioration and the principles of safe keeping that will help keep your Treasures healthy for Generations there are three major major areas through which these forces of deterioration attack your objects so number one is the objects composition now we divide objects into various classes and the Ceramics Stone

Metals For example are what we call inorganic objects organic objects are things like textiles leather something made of plants um baskets for example and so those are the two basic categories that most things break down into so the object's composition this is a an archaeological pod it's ceramic and so it's fairly stable whoops okay I went really far that time these are some seminal textiles and so these are going to be more susceptible to certain things that I'll be talking about later another area that affects how objects are preserved is the environment in which the objects are kept I'll discuss these in more detail as I go along and the third major category is how

the objects are used as I said this is uh this is an example of an inorganic object so it doesn't need as much care they're inherently more stable the textiles are not paper is another organic material um and then there's what we call oops inherent Vice and this is a term that we use to describe objects that break themselves down for example paper there's a lot of paper that was manufactured in the late 19th century into the 20th century and still today that's very acidic the manufacture of paper changed in the 19th century from they used to use rags and cotton to produce paper and they started using wood and the material that makes up

the wood as you break it down and the chemicals that you have to put into the wood to break it down to make paper make the paper highly acidic and you can see in this slide this is old scrapbook paper and how it's become brittle and broken itself down this is a one of my old paper bags and you can look at all this you can see how this is very Brown and that's because the paper is actually burning itself up the acid in it and then the moisture from the air creates the acid and burns the paper up and that's why when you look at old newspapers old paperbacks they're usually fairly Brown and

you can see how this one's I carry around in my sample box and it's so brittle that pieces of it have broken off through the years um okay construction techniques also contribute to how well artifacts are maintained for example with this military hat the chemicals in the leather can actually corrode the metal accoutrements that are on the hat there's another thing that's going on there with the brim where it's become dried out and the leather has become brittled over time so the environment what does that involve there are several areas related to environment humidity and temperature light pests and dust and pollutants humidity and temperature are one of the most important areas to control and

it depends on the manufacture or the the what the object is made up of as to what kind of humidity and temperature you need levels of humidity and temperature the changes can accelerate the deterioration of objects high humidity levels promote mold and mildew and corrosion and metals um it's a an example of some silver you can see the dark areas on the silver it's become corroded um and this is a Plains Indian piece that the quill work you can see where it's broken it's become too dry and so it's um all the quills have broken and we call that embrittlement objects like baskets leather parchment Ivory horn and wood need to the air to be

a little more moist if it's too dry and they split crack and become brittle rapid fluctuations in temperature and humidity can damage an object because it creates microscopically creates stresses and the object cannot adjust to those changes so for example if the temperature has been fairly High during the day and it rapidly decreases and to become very cold it will get very dry and the objects can't adjust that fast temperature is important because it affects humidity it affects the amount of moisture that the air can hold and high temperatures can also accelerate chemical deterioration so and this happens all you can't see this going on until it's already happened and you see it over the

course of years um it's it's taking it's taking place in the microscopic structure of the material um so for example paper and photographs and leathers and textiles baskets can deteriorate more quickly when they're stored in an attic or in a garage because of the the changes in the temperature and humidity all right thank you here we go so the key to taking care of your objects is to maintain as as best you can a stable humidity into and temperature and avoid those extreme fluctuations in your home you can control humidity by adjusting the air conditioner or using dehuma dehumidifiers or humidifiers where needed now mostly in Florida we don't need to use humidifiers because it's

always too wet we need to control the mold and the mildew so we need to use a dehumidifiers again you want to avoid using attics or garages as storage places we most of us don't have basements but that's another place that can be very damp you don't want to store things in a basement if you can avoid it I also like people to keep their Windows shut because opening your windows creates different climates in your house and again you can have those rapid changes I know for me but in particular too the pollen gets in and I I don't open my windows because I'm really allergic to the pollen but you'll see later on why

pollen can be a deteriorating Factor light is another really important factor to control there are different components of light that are damaging to objects it's the ultraviolet light and we know this because we know our skin is damaged by the ultraviolet light from the sun and so can textiles and objects that have been dyed this is a basket a Native American basket that we have in our collection and this happened long before we got it but you can see the area that was covered by the lid still maintains the original color whereas the up the area that was whoops um exposed to the light faded drastically so you want to keep your objects out of

the sunlight and um fluorescent lights emit UV so you want to keep them away from fluorescent lights incandescent lights now most of us don't even use those anymore but incandescent and halogen lights produce not only damaging light but also heat and I think most places have gotten away from using halogen lights the LED lights that are now available are really great because they don't emit heat and they don't emit a lot of damaging radiation light radiation now the problem with light is that the effects are cumulative so once an object has been exposed to light you can't fix that and the the cumulative effects are related both to the length of exposure and the level

of light so something that's had a short-term exposure to high levels of light can be as damaged as something that's has a long term exposure to low levels of light um and not only can the light cause fading but it can also cause drying and embrittlement and there are a lot of ways that you can protect your objects from light you can use uh drapes in your house you can keep objects away from um sitting under a lamp but again now with the LED lights a lot has changed in the past several years um you can filter UV lights this is a an example of a filter that wraps around a fluorescent tube that will

cut down on the UV light that it blocks the UV light from being admitted um and again you don't want to put sensitive objects near windows so paintings artwork things like the basket the dyed basket you want to keep them away from the sunlight if you look in your room where you have artwork displayed and you follow how the Sun goes around the room during the day you can pick out a place where the artwork is not in any direct sunlight any time of the day one of the things that we do and that you can do as well as we we rest objects we remove them from display periodically and replace them with other

objects if we have objects to replace them with but you have to remember again that that light damage cannot be undone so resting an object won't undo the damage but it will prevent further damage so things like vintage clothing if you have that on display A friend of mine has an old um seamstress form sewing form and she has a vintage nightgown displaying on that so um if you do something like that you want to make sure that periodically you put it away or put something another piece of clothing that you have on it um now pests can be really damaging to objects and you know also in Florida not only do we have a

lot of humidity we have a lot of pests and there are lots of different kinds of pests that can cause harm mice and roaches two things they leave urine and droppings that stain and those stains are really difficult to remove most of the time you have to take that to a conservator to have them use special chemicals and things to remove those stains and the mice can just chew through I can't even believe how much stuff I've had not heirlooms but other stuff because I had a way they were getting into my kitchen and going in my kitchen drawers and join my potholders and my spatulas and my yeah it was horrible so they can

do a lot of damage in a short period of time moss and silverfish eat coals in clothes but also in paper so you have to be really careful and in Florida we get a lot of silverfish you'll find areas especially if it's like a closet that's damp and that is dark a lot they love damp Dark Places beetles and termites we all know destroy wood um and it's the warm damp conditions and any dust or dirt or food sources for insects like paper and protein and all different kinds of materials that they like to eat um that encourages them to stay you can look for signs of infestation you can find egg cases larva or

sometimes even active bugs we've occasionally gotten things somebody wanted to donate and what we do at the Museum is we do not bring them into the museum directly until we've checked them four pests and we've had a couple of times have rugs donated or textiles and opened them up and actually the malls have flown out of the textile but we have a way to fumigate things on canvas because we have a the pest control unit on campus anyway I'll talk a little bit about that more later um if you see holes or what we call frass that's wood dust say if you see a piece of furniture and you see some sawdust around the bottom

or under a drawer that's a sign that you might have termites or actually centipedes also will drill holes into wooden furniture so the best protection for pests is to keep their your house clean keep the house dusted and vacuumed closed gaps that allow us to get into your house eliminate sources of water and food for them not only the food that we eat but as I said the um other things that they like to eat a lot of smaller pests like to eat the glues in things for example you need to check your storage areas regularly because the sooner that you find a pest infestation the easier it is to take care of and the

less damage you will have in the long run check the objects that you're bringing into your home as I said we we checked them before we bring them into the museum and at home you can do a couple of things you can isolate them for a couple of weeks and re-examine them for signs of infestation you can isolate them in plastic bags eggs or plastic sheeting so that you can monitor them over the course of a couple of weeks because sometimes it's really hard to see the eggs or The larva and those it's the larva that does the most damage but it's hard to see them and so if you um if you set it

aside for a little while you'll start to see those signs if you find something that is infested you need to get it taken care of fumigated or treated for peop for individuals the thing that I recommend is calling the different pest control companies like Florida pest control and there are others local companies in your area some of those companies are very good at working with objects and you can talk to them about what you have and then they can say yes we can do it no we can't there are new methods that we use for treating pests freezing and anoxic treatments that means removing all the oxygen but those are really difficult for an individual

to do your pest control company might use those types of methods but probably not too many of them do that and the freezing has to be done a special way you can't just put it in your freezer because it cannot be a frost-free freezer where the temperature goes up above freezing and down and up and down because that will kill off the animal or they or their eggs or The larva now believe it or not what I wanted to tell you about this you can see the back of the grandfather clock where the termites have eaten away and the problem with things like that is they usually set up against a wall and you don't

even know that you have a problem until it's become a big problem the uh the quill work was eaten by um probably some kind of beetle um now the The Mask that's an interesting case because that was a wooden mask from Indonesia it was um the insects were inside the nose and they chewed out the inside of the nose and then when somebody picked it up and picked it up improperly their thumb punched through the nose and broke the nose so that's two things pest damage and improper handling which I will talk about in a minute um now these things you wouldn't think about so much they're dust pollutants smog pollen as I talked about

some materials are made out of non-archival things like plywood is made out of wood chips and formaldehyde and formaldehyde glues and all of that material if it's non-archival off gas off gases chemicals that deteriorate your objects the the dust and the pollution in the air dust is abrasive pollen is abrasive if you've ever seen um a microscopic view of pollen grains they look like spiky balls and rough coral and all kinds of things so they're abrasive um the chemicals in the air like sulfur and nitrogen mixed with the moisture in the air and create sulfuric and nitric acid all of this is on a microscopic level as I said earlier so you don't see it

until the damage is done sometimes you will see an object that's been dusted a lot um that's gotten scratches in it and you know spine scratches um so it's just all these things contribute to decaying your object ordinary plastic bag cardboard boxes emit acids and additives as I said um and when there's a lot of heat or moisture in the air or small closed spaces all of that is magnified so again Good Housekeeping keeping the air circulating don't store fit something in a in a closet and leave it there I don't really use those dry cleaner bags I take my clothes out I don't use store anything in those plastic bags in Florida and I've

got an example of an old garment bag that you can look at afterwards that was made out of polyvinyl chloride plastic and it's actually sticky now um anything that says it's PVC which means polyvinyl chloride again the chloride mixes with the moisture in the air and creates hydrochloric acid and that's why that plastic breaks down and gets stick okay let's see um if you're using a material it should be called archival or acid free papers and boxes should be termed lignin free or acid free and all of those kinds of materials are available from these archival supply companies I did forget to say at the beginning I have not only I have two handouts one

is a list of helpful books and pamphlets and um a list of the suppliers another oops another one is the list of all these materials that I've been talking about this evening if you would like a copy you they'll have a sheet there you can sign up and I will email or mail you a copy of these handouts I don't print them out anymore because it was a lot of a waste of paper so all right so they're they're you can look through them later at the end um but anyway if you'd like a copy you can let me know um now earlier I referred to um I think that mine is skipped no okay

um well this was it has a mind of its own this is one of the ways that we protect objects from dust and pollutants we cover the actual storage units with um some kind of material like plastic sheeting or this was an old Silk Parachute from an army surplus store that's long we've had to get rid of that finally after about 50 years it finally came apart but um I had a student sew me a nice cover for that rug rack out of muslin so muslin you can use this is a an archaeological pot we've made a mount for it out of this ethophone and there's some examples on the table and then we've covered

it with a polyethylene plastic to protect all right let's see what okay so as you as I said earlier there's one of those major categories that can cause damage is object use any use of an object over time of course causes wear and tear so why just tell people to use their heirlooms judiciously I know that um most people have heirlooms for a reason and they want to display them they want to use them they want to show them off so I what I recommend is that perhaps you only want to use them for a special occasion a certain holiday or an event a family event perhaps a birthday um but it's totally your decision

you have to assess the value of the object to you and how long you want it to last and then evaluate the risks in handling or displaying that object and that's just something that you have to decide for yourself these are a couple of ways that well I share the good handling and the bad handling this is how we roll our Navajo Rugs we wear gloves and we roll them on acid-free tubes and that tube happens to be covered with acid-free tissue not white this is an ivory horn and the woman has just picked it up and you can see that it's left fingerprints where she's picked it up this is from a book that's

over on the table a conservator wrote a book on handling objects and she Drew these cartoons um okay the next slide these are a couple of ways that illustrate the proper ways to handle on objects with any look okay got it these clicker things are just their own how far did that go okay sorry about that okay there we go sorry um this is showing how you should handle something that has appendages like handles you want to create a nice padded environment you can use towels you can use bubble wrap covered with tissue paper and a some free tissue there are foam I have examples of poly foam over there and you want to handle

it with both hands so when I pick up an object that has handles or a spout or something like that I pick it up by the side and underneath and carry it to where I'm going we use cotton gloves we also have now started using nitrile gloves and those you can get in the Walgreens Walmart any pharmacy CVS they carry Nitro gloves now I don't keep latex gloves because so many people have become allergic to latex I have a volunteer who hates the Nitro gloves so she still uses the cotton gloves you have to assess whether or not um the cotton gloves should be used if you have a decaying or powdery surface then or

if there's a danger of catching on a rough spot then use a plastic glove nitrile or I think Walgreens and other places sell what they call vinyl gloves so they're non-latex as well you want to remove jewelry you don't want necklaces or bracelets or rings that are going to knock into the object um when you're working with small objects I put them on a padded surface or in a little tray I use I have boxes that have lids and I use those Lids as trays if you have something that has multiple Parts like a cup of saucer or a teapot with a lid you should move those individually or make sure that the for example

on the teapot that the lid is secured before you move it around um this is just an example what we don't think about when we're moving things is these objects are old they're not in the same condition as modern objects that we have we don't know what condition they're in we don't know how fragile they are so we have to treat everything old as if it's very fragile and could break or could come apart when we're handling things um again this is be careful handling things that you don't know if they're fragile or not this is that example the wooden Mass where the person punched through with their thumb when they picked it up um

this is a that same pot that I showed you earlier and what we've done with this again we've used the Epiphone and it's carved out there's a circular carve area in there so it sits down in the foam we've used two pieces and then that's its storage mount this we put a piece of black fabric on it and we can display it right in its storage Mount so we can take it to our exhibits building cover it with a fabric and we're done um again if you have you should never carry a lot of objects at the same time we usually only carry one thing at a time or we get a cart and we

put things on the cart if you put something on a cart you have to make sure that it's stable that it's not going to rock around or tip over and you can use padding to hold it sometimes I'll lay something on its side and use a roll of bubble wrap to secure it to like get it moved things can be heavy so if you have a heavy object make sure that you get enough people to help you move it if you can't don't think you can move it yourself um because I've seen people first of all you can injure yourself secondly you can injure the object you should not smoke or eat in the areas

where you're working with your object now in your home when you're displaying your objects of course you're going to be eating in various areas if you have a party or something but um I don't want to sit for example if I'm using my laptop and I want to eat while I'm using my laptop I take my TV tray and put it next to the table and my food and my drink are on the table usually I do not eat when I'm working on the laptop I just have a drink there and I don't get it anywhere near my laptop um so that's just an example you don't want to be right next to something um

again it's your decision do you want to use your old antique dishware for a party or something it's your decision if you really want to use it you should but remember that that's gonna take some where it's going to make some wear and tear on the on the plates or the dishware um let's see I've gotten through all of that um there are special objects that we have to take very we have to be very careful with for example Firearms old Firearms should never be loaded unless you're sure if you're going to use them and you know that they're safe to use they should never be stored loaded pharmaceutical objects old medicine bottles old containers

of medicines they can be poisonous they can be combustible and so you want to be very careful there's contents left in those types of objects with paper documents and photographs slides sound recordings video recordings digital recordings what we do with those is often will make a copy then we'll use the copy say for exhibit or um if you're doing say a genealogical study and you want to share some photographs with your family make copies or make them wear gloves because photographs any photographic material is very susceptible to the oils on your fingers and I have seen photographs and metals too that have been etched permanently etched and show the fingerprint um on the object um

okay this is an example of proper and improper cleaning um sometimes we do have to clean our objects I mean we want to clean them and there are certain things that you can do detergents and soaps can lean harmful residues we try to use things like if we're going to try to wash something we just use a damp rag or you can use a little bit of Woolite I don't know if they still make Ivory Snow we used to use that if we wanted to wash something you have if you have an old piece of clothing think very long and hard before you wash it and don't put it in the washing machine do it

by hand I've heard people would put things out in the sun to bleach them if you have a textile say a table runner a tablecloth or a piece of clothing that have spots do don't put it out in the sun because you're getting that UV light um don't put bleach on it either because that's got chlorine in it um you can scrub or polish an object where you actually remove the over plating many metals for example brass was often silver plated silver is often gold-plated and you have to be really careful so what's happened with this object this was silver and you can see the brass here where they've over polished and scrubbed off the

Silver plating unfortunately some of the polishes that you get in a store they're not liquid they're pace and they can be they're abrasive so you have to be very very careful some of the liquids the chemicals are abrasive in a different way they're bad chemicals to use on the objects another thing to think about is that um the use and the wear are part of the object's history so you don't want to take away that history it may have a sentimental value say um I don't can't think of an example but but that sign of being used is is as important as the object being clean or brand new looking we really tell people to

try not to return something to looking brand new I know there's that famous example from Antiques Roadshow where somebody removed the varnish the black varnish from a piece of furniture and the guys told them how much they had decreased the value by taking that black varnish off the furniture um all right a lot of times people want to try to repair their heirlooms that is a very specific study conservators repair things they study for a long time learning how to properly repair items we have this is actually an object from our collection it's an archaeological pot thousand or so years old can you see where the Scotch tape was stuck to it and that won't

come off there's nothing that I can use on it to take that off now Scotch tape on the document on the it was on the back but it's bled through to the front uh what is it a chemical reaction right because those tapes have acidic glue basically the glue and it it damaged you know it breaks down the objects but also then make some you know stain something like this it's it's basically burning the paper um that the pot see I'm gonna go the right way that is the residue from the tape and because it's so it was so on there for so long it's kind of melded with the ceramic and you can't you

can't use any chemical to get it off with it just won't come off okay these this is glue so I'm sure you all remember rubber cement and we had scrapbooks and we put everything in the scrapbooks with rubber cement and this is what happens it comes through these are photographs where that glue whatever they used has come through and stained the photograph okay I'll get to that in a second be be wary of home remedies that um your grand mother might have told you or her mother you know to get white rings off furniture use this or use that or make this or that a lot of times those are made out of materials or

chemicals that will actually damage the object um people in the past have used products to fill in holes in wooden furniture and that can actually create stresses as it dries out and gets moist and dry and that can crack the furniture further there's wood putty on the market and just that should not be used on antique furniture to repair antique furniture um so these are some of the ways some of the materials that we use to store our objects in um these are some acid-free boxes with interior cartons trays um remay and polyester mat board acid free paper I've got a lot of that stuff that you can look at after we're finished one of

the things that most of us have in our houses are wooden cabinets say I'm a china cabinet you may have a wooden cabinet that you store things in um if you buy something new say um unfinished unpainted wooden cabinet if you want to paint it then you should use water-based acrylic paint don't use oil based anymore because oil-based first of all takes forever to off gas and that means that it's releasing Vapors and products that because you can smell that you can smell latex water-based paint and if you paint something you need to let it um you need to let that off gassing happen and so you need to let it sit for a couple

of weeks before you use it um if you do have a wooden cabinet like a china cabinet or something that you use we can put their special materials we can put down you could put down the my bar there's a piece of mylar out there or what we call Marble seal and I think that may be um hopefully they'll you'll see that in a little bit um these are some of the cabinets that we use we have old map cases that we use and we cover the bottoms these are the artifacts are on top of the of the foam and the tissue that we use to fill the trays um you can cover if you

have shelving units you can cover the racks with foam and tissue or just the foam again these are examples this is the Marvel seal it's mylar on the top and aluminum foil on the back side and if you put that down on top of a wooden shelf then the materials from the wood they're stopped by the aluminum they can't come up through the aluminum and so we use that a lot to create barriers for some of our objects and some of our storage units um when you speak of a phone are you talking just playing styrofoam no styrofoam contains chlorides and it breaks down if you look at and there's that yellow foam that's urethane

and that too that produces uric acid or uremic acid and you'll see old pieces of that you pick them up and your fingers just go through and they break down they're brittle um so special yeah yeah and actually and it's treated I absolutely it's not it's the way it's made it's not treated it's made out of either polyethylene or polypropylene or polystyrene and again if you want to come over at the end I can show you all these different materials and they're also marked I've marked everything so most everything so you can see what it is um okay let's continue on here there we go we saw that already uh textile boxes you can order

those from Gaylord and the tissue to um store your clothing in if you do want to store like a quilt or a blanket if you don't want to roll it you can fold it up but you need to pad those folds and what we do is we roll up acid-free tissue and we stick it in the fold so that it's not if you fold this it gets creased and over the years that that breaks the fibers in the clothing or in the textile um if you have let's see if you have multiple pieces you can store them in a box or in a tray like the tray that I showed you let's see let's go

back that those kind of trays so that you can separate the objects uh though all of this stuff is available to the individual um as I said earlier now let me go forward okay this is a Sue it's a baby baby's cap um all we've done is wadded up acid-free tissue so that we it will help it maintain its shape it's leather and then this is all quill work porcupine quills that they prepared and dyed and used they used a lot of those before they got trade beads um what about those the Seminole clothing that you showed ago right what are you sure that stuff we we store it in um in drawers in these

big cabinets that we have one time with like tissue or foam and tissue and but you can you could store it in one of these big textile boxes so if you hang it up and hang it out in the air it will deteriorate well let me show you the next you can hang certain fabric and then the thing about the seminal textiles that's good anything that's cotton or muslin rayon can be hung you know polyesters so we create these padded hangers and you you can buy them but they're really expensive so I take plastic hangers and I take um that um batting that you use to make quilts with and I wrap it around and

then I cover it with muslin or Tyvek now tyvek's great but it's super expensive so you would I would recommend that you just go to the fabric store and buy muslin if you buy fabric at the fabric store you need to wash it in Woolite or something like that before you use it because they have additives sometimes that you can wash out um this shows an example of they've taken an old Hangar and used that batting and this is the Tyvek but Muslim does just as well then you can see this small the Small Things in a box um another thing that we do is simply create this is a a basket and I've cut

a piece of matte or you can't see it really I'm sorry about that it's sitting on a piece of mat board and then I slid the whole thing into a a bag a polyethylene bag now I didn't close the bag because the problem with bags is if you close them you can get sometimes you can get condensation inside so that's um we try to keep the things open and air moving um okay this is an example of what I meant by padding things that areas that can get creased this is just again just just a wad of acid-free paper or tissue and we've supported the shoulders of the object here these are small objects again

you can see all the different ways that these acrylic boxes you can buy from Gaylord the paper boxes you can buy some Gaylord this is stored on a piece of that batting tissue these small trays this is silver cloth and I'm sure if you have silver collections um if you have silverware say and they used to come in these boxes and inside the box was this um Brown fabric that has a corrosion inhibitor sewn into the fabric so the little pieces of metal in the fabric corrode so that your silver doesn't now sometimes you end up having to replace that but you can buy that and they now make um bags out of it they

make coin holders out of it I have a different kind of a coin holder over there for you to look at but that's really great stuff oops we've made our own we made our own tray with diviners out of um an acid-free box we cut up other boxes that made it ourselves this is acid-free tissue that's been pleated these are archaeological bone points and we just pleated the paper I didn't do that that's old but we still use that technique bags again storing things in bags um Ziploc bags are polyethylene so if you buy Ziploc bags in the store you can use them a Rubbermaid containers do not have non-archino archival additives you can use

those as well um this is um an example where we took some phone sheeting and cut out cavities this is a bubble wrap and we cut out a cavity for a bone pin bone point and then all these layers go in this acid-free box es yeah now Bumble wraps interesting because you can use it with certain things and you can use you can't use it with other things bubble wrap can leave an impression I there's an example of a painting that was shipped that had which I don't have a picture of unfortunately where the bubble wrap actually imprinted itself on the into the paint um I've seen a piece of ceramic it it imprinted itself

on the surf the glaze of that ceramic so you have to be really careful what we normally do is wrap stuff in acid-free tissue and then wrap it in the bubble wrap there's very few things where I actually let the bubble wrap touch the object now this is this is a bone pen and I know the bubble wrap's not going to affect it in any way so um documents you can get these boxes you can buy asset free folders you can make make your own for this is a book and they've made a folder for you can actually buy these two already made um where Gaylord I use Gaylord for almost everything um these clam

shell boxes for photographs um interleaved with acid-free tissue or there's sheets you can buy Gaylord that company sells a lot of things in small quantities and good prices off every once in a while there's something that I need that you might need that you can't get from Gaylord University products but they're really expensive now they sell in small quantities too so unless I can't get it anyplace else then I buy University products Hollinger metal Edge and the catalogs are up there they um they all have good prices and they also sell in small quantities this is an old metal slide box and they're still good because these are enamel they're they're powered what they call

powder coated where the paint was applied in powder form electrochemically to the metal so they don't off gas and they don't um they don't deposit anything on the artifacts or the specimens um this is really important if you have a piece of artwork that you want to have framed make sure you ask the place that you go the framer do they use archival matte or do they use or do they do archival framing because if they don't they're using cardboard and at acidic emitting papers um if you get a piece of artwork and they put a Plexi cover on it rather than glass that's okay you can't do it for pastels or charcoal because it

creates electrostatic and it will pull the charcoal it will pull the pastel chalk off up onto the Plexiglas so and these good framers should know these things um now recordings some of us have old records CDs um tapes may be still and you can buy specially sized boxes you can buy these paper acid-free paper sleeves for records for photographs and um record the records are supposed to be stored you might be able to help you with this Rick they're supposed to be stored vertically I think yes photographs should be stored horizontally if you have to stack boxes if you're storing things in boxes remember to put the heaviest spots on the bottom so that you

don't crush the the other boxes let me go back and okay let me make sure I think there was some other things on the recordings um again with recordings you can copy them sometimes and use the copies uh right now there's equipment out where you can record your own old records onto a CD Now CDs are becoming passe but I've been doing that with a lot of my records because I still have a CD player um there's a lot more going on digitally now so you can investigate various digital methods one of the things we're doing at the museums are making uh 3D copies of objects so we may make a 3D copy for that

people can handle for educational programs or for exhibit if the object is too fragile to go out and exhibit so and that's becoming more and more available to the General Public um so in general in conclusion if you're comfortable your objects will be comfortable so again avoid those extremes of temperature and humidity if you want to hang something interior walls interior rooms interior closets are more stable than those on the exterior and you can feel that sometimes I don't have that great insulation in my house and I can feel um sometimes I open my dishwasher and it's really hot in my dishwasher because it's on an outside wall so just think about those things when

you're thinking about what to do with your um with your objects limit the light exposure inspect your heirlooms regularly be gentle when you're cleaning them if you want to repair them call a museum ask them if they can put you in touch with a conservator or ask them how they would repair it I can do certain repairs myself because I've studied that but if it's really worthwhile to you to pay a conservator they'll do it correctly um but a lot of Museum all of us who deal with Collections and museums have these connections to other people that can help you um and avoid the quick fix it or do it do it yourself treatments and

one thing that we suggest anything if you do alter an object make sure it's something that you can undo you saw with the glues and the tapes you can't undo those um all right so I'm happy to take questions now uh we can I can do it now we can go over to the table yes before I knew anything about acid free photo albums I put some photos old photos were in one of those remember the magnetic the magnetic yes so some of those photos affect the majority of them now have mildew on them right right what can I do with those okay so there's two issues with that because the mildew um mildew is

hard to clean because if you use alcohol you can damage leather you can get photographs are very susceptible to damage of any kind of from any kind of chemical or from handling what I would yes exactly what I would suggest for your photographs is that you um use now we have a vacuum cleaner where we can adjust the um the suction if you have one put it on the lowest suction use a soft brush or just the edge of your the hose and vacuum it if your vacuum cleaner has a HEPA filter a lot of them do now that's even better because it'll catch the mold spores and then throw that filter away clean up

the vacuum cleaner parts with alcohol you can use rubbing alcohol you get from the store too um but just be really careful with that so before I take the photo and put it in an acid-free album right I need to clean it first you do because mold will spread and you'll then in fact you'll contaminate the new acid-free and the other problem you're going to have with that is those mag those strips that they were magnetic um their glue strips actually and you're going to have a lot of trouble getting them off I noticed um so what I did I took a really thin metal spatula because we got an album donated and I just

carefully worked that spatula under the photographs um most of them came up pretty well but you might get a little bit of tearing because you just have to be really careful thank you yes laminating will you comment on that um unless you know what the plastic is that you're laminating I don't recommend it the other thing with laminating is that it creates a micro climate and you can get unless it's done really well you can get condensation inside the laminate also the problem is once it's laminated you can't undo it you're not supposed to do anything that you couldn't reverse right right and what there's lots of different types of mylar envelopes and plastic envelopes

you can order from Gaylord to put things in some of them close some of them haven't the opening it doesn't zip close or anything we use those for a lot of photographs documents because they can be taken in and out of those envelopes I really love there's there's some and I have some of those too they're sleeves plastic sleeves all made out of the polyethylene that can go into a notebook and they come they can hold negatives three by three by five photograph five four by six five by seven eight by ten all different they come in all different slides all different sizes so um and they're also available and I I store most of

our photographs in those so yes you mentioned the process of removing the oxygen right could you describe what that is it's at a chamber and then what it's for and what you would normally use it for okay and that process is going to be something that you probably can't do by yourself at home there's a number of different methods you can make a chamber that you conceal really well um we also use that Marvel steel we make envelopes because it it can be heat sealed on the edges and then there are packets that are called oxygen scavengers and you put those in before you seal the bag there's a formula for figuring out how many

you need of the chamber you then have equipment to suck out all the oxygen some of them replace it with nitrogen um it's such a complicated process that I don't know anybody who can really do it at home um but again if you're if you have a one object or so maybe somebody in a museum can help um is it for paper articles it's for everything um in fact viscaya has done it with big pieces of furniture they've created these huge envelopes and then use the equipment the vacuum equipment and the oxygen scavengers too um suck out all the oxygen the problem with part of it is if you do it sometimes it gets too

dry in the envelope and so there's all these equations you have to use to figure out do I need to put a humidifier in there or do I need to make it dry or do I need to make it wetter if I'm doing something organic so fortunately for us we still have people 's foot and like I said I don't know what some of the pest control companies are doing I don't know if they've adopted these new methods because they're non-poisonous to us not to be on you know well of course if you're in a room and you remove all the oxygen you're going to die but um they're better ways than the old pesticides