Pesticides in natural history collections

I am currently finishing my masters in conservation studies and have
been doing research on pesticides used in herbaria, their long term
stability, identification, and health risks. One major gap I have
found in my research, however, is in elemental analysis.  I
apologize in advance if this question has an obvious answer, but I
have not found one thus far.

Has anybody conducted any elemental analysis on a survey of samples
of herbarium (or any natural history collection for that matter)
materials?  Has information on these studies been published?  If so,
may I please share in any references you may have?  If not, do you
think that this sort of research (a survey of older materials and
finding out what's still on them and if it's at all dangerous) would
be useful to the field?  I have met an analytical chemist who is
very excited and would love the opportunity to take on this
challenge if it is not simply a repetition of previous work.
Any advice would be appreciated,

Jennifer E. Hain
Preservation and Conservation Studies
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas at Austin

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 13:32
                Distributed: Thursday, December 2, 1999
                       Message Id: cdl-13-32-021
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