Unfinished wood flooring

Our collection houses 100 years worth of maps and engineering
drawings of the water management facilities in this area. We are
renovating our storage vault today and installing new metal flat
files to hold our archival engineering drawings.

We were informed this morning that the cabinets will need to be
raised another four inches to be compatible with the raised flooring
being installed later in another part of the vault.

The guys in facilities want to raise the cabinets by placing planks
of unfinished pressure treated lumber beneath them.

The bottoms of our filing cabinets are not sealed--when the bottom
drawer is open, the airspace inside the cabinet will be contiguous
with the unfinished wood.

    1.  How much of a concern is this from a preservation
        environment point of view? How worried should I be about
        humidity, mildew, mold, chemical offgassing, etc?

    2.  What can I do to mitigate the problems? I need a solution
        that's pretty fast, because the guys are already here
        working. I think I'm stuck with that floor,and may just have
        to work around it, minimizing hazards as best I can, unless
        I can prove there is an urgent hazard in the project.

    3.  We've talked about vacuuming the new lumber, covering it
        with a sheet of mylar before putting down the new cabinets,
        and leaving some airspace at the end of the row to allow the
        boards to breathe a bit. Do these sound like sensible ideas?
        I'm also concerned about whether a slippery sheet of mylar
        may cause seismic problems, since we live in an earthquake
        area. Is it enough of a benefit to be worth the risk?

Lonnie Spin
Records manager/archivist
Santa Clara Valley Water District


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 17:59
                  Distributed: Tuesday, March 16, 2004
                       Message Id: cdl-17-59-021
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