Disaster recovery and natural history collections

    **** Moderator's comments:   Please respond directly to the
    author

I am a conservation intern putting together a disaster recovery plan
for natural history collections at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum as
my research project. The museum has a current disaster plan with
prevention and very general first response information.

I have been asked to prepare instructions for the people who will be
treating the collections. I have found several articles that
describe in adequate detail how to treat library and archival
collections but almost nothing about natural history collections.
Unfortunately our museum did experience a fire 8 years ago, so I do
have first hand information about soot removal from animal and bird
mounts. I have copies of the 2 papers given at an AIC meeting in
1993 by the conservators from our museum. There was no water damage
to collections.

I am interested in hearing from other people who have experience
with post-disaster recovery of natural history collections from any
of the following events: fire/soot, water, chemical exposure (as
from fire suppression or accidental emission from a factory)

I have searched the CoOL archives, the 2 "Storage of Natural History
Collections..." sold by the SPNHC, the NIC's Emergency Response and
Salvage Wheel, SPNHC journals, IIC-CG journals, AIC journals, and
tried to get to the NHCOLL-L archives several times, but the links
don't seem to work anymore.

Andrea Maierhoffer
Conservation intern
Royal Saskatchewan Museum

                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 11:79
                 Distributed: Wednesday, March 25, 1998
                       Message Id: cdl-11-79-016
                                  ***