 Hi, everyone. We are going to give it just a minute or so for everyone to populate the Zoom webinar room. But thank you all for joining us today. And while we get started, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen super fast. Okay, so you are here today for another CSEE Care webinar. My name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo and I'm coming to you just outside of Washington DC in Silver Spring, Maryland. A couple of quick Zoom tips for everyone, which I think we are all very aware of how Zoom works. But it's always good to remind you that we are recording today's session. So if you have to bow out early or you maybe know someone who might be interested in it, feel free and we'll probably have this recording posted on our website probably early next week. I've also enabled closed captioning for this webinar. So if you're interested in that service, feel free to hit that CC button down at the bottom and that system will pop back on. So you are here today for Old Wives, Tales, and Urban Legends CSEE Care webinar as part of the annual Ask a Conservator Day. Hope you enjoyed today's program. Again, my name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo and I am the CSEE Care Coordinator. If you're new to us, I always like to point out our home on the web, connecting to collections.org. On that website, you will find all sorts of future information on programming. You will get links to our archive of webinars and courses. You will also find a link to our moderated community where you can ask questions for amongst a group of fabulous monitors and experts who will answer them on questions on direct collections care and also a source of curated resources. So I encourage you to go to that website if you are interested. We have two places online or on social media that you can follow our program. They are on Facebook and on Twitter. So I encourage you to go to those if you're interested in future programming or just what's happening within the collections community in general. And as I said, we're using Zoom webinar today, so you have two ways to communicate to us. You can communicate in the chat to say hello or you can do questions in the Q&A box. So this format today is going to be a little different where we are going to be, you're going to have a chance. We've already had some questions submitted to our panelists who are joining us today, but you will also have a chance to ask some questions. I also wanted to kind of set the base for today's program where we are not here to make fun of or do anything in that line for these ideas that came up during when we did the general call out for if you'd heard anything unusual amongst your experience in the collections world when it came to cleaning or collections care. Our goal today is really to make you kind of guess come to the realization that I think is important to everyone that we all hear these kind of stories. You're not alone. Everyone has heard some sort of interesting story coming off the street possibly from a potential donor that maybe you would like to say, I'm not sure about that, but you're not quite sure if there's factual basis to it. So we're hoping today's program will actually give you some tips and tricks on how to kind of handle these kind of questions that come off the street when it comes to collections care. So just heads up on that. We have three panelists joining us today. We have Heather Galloway, Conservator of Painted Surfaces, Courtney Murray, who's the Objects Conservator at the Midwest Art Conservation Center, and Sarah Norris, who's the Assistant Professor in Practice in Library and Archives Conservation and Preservation at the University of Texas School of Information. So today's program is going to be us looking at some of these questions that have been submitted talking about them, seeing if there's some truth, seeing if there's some fallacy, and then we're going to maybe have some fun along the way all part of Ask a Conservator Day, an annual thing that happens every November 4th. So I'm going to go ahead and hop to our first question that was submitted and we're going to kind of open this up for a general conversation. But the first question that was submitted on our anonymous form was saliva can be a good spot cleaner on solid surfaces as it contains enzymes that help remove dirt. So I'm going to open the floor to everyone and see if they have any thoughts on that. The question of using saliva on surfaces. Heather, do you have any thoughts on that concept? Yes, I do. Yeah. I'm not muted, correct? Yes. You're good. It is actually true. Yes, it is true saliva, which is 98% water, does have a number of things that can aid in cleaning electrolytes, antibacterial compounds, and it has some enzymes including amylase, which is an enzyme that conservators will sometimes independently try to access to aid in cleaning. It also has ions in it that can help in the exchange of picking up dirt. So it is true that saliva can be used in cleaning on a practical level. It really gives you a brand new definition of dry mouth. Very difficult to clean something a lot with saliva and if you get down onto the scientific level for conservation scientists who are trying to aid us in working with cleaning solutions, they will tell you that you should rinse your saliva from the surface of something because you would be leaving those non-water-based components behind such as the enzymes. But it is often one of the first go-tos that I have when I stick a swab in my mouth. You can't get it very wet, so it means if I'm about to touch a surface that's going to be water sensitive with saliva, I tend not to bring much moisture. So it is true. We can use saliva. I use it mostly in testing and it's not, from my point of view, it's not practical to clean with saliva, but maybe some of the other participants have some ideas. So Courtney, you deal with objects, right? So what's been your experience with using saliva? I'd say the same as Heather. Yes, it's great for testing. Occasionally, I'll use it in a situation where I do want to control the amount of moisture that I'm bringing to the surface. I will just note though that your own saliva changes depending on what you just ate or drank. So if you just drink a cup of coffee, then your saliva is much more acidic than if you drank a glass of milk, for example, or something else. So I always try to be aware of that if I'm going to do a test with saliva because as Heather was saying, it's difficult to repeat it. You can test and have one cleaning effect, but all of the variables of your own saliva change. So it's important to keep in mind. And yes, not practical when you're talking about cleaning something that's like huge and massive. Unless you've got a lot of interns. I'm kidding. I would not encourage that. But yeah, it is interesting that there's a little bit of truth to it, you know what I mean? And I know working with conservators, they've often said, Oh, no, saliva. I was like, okay, when I first heard that. So it's kind of fun to know that there is some truth to that. So very cool. All right. So our next question, this is going to be heading over to the to probably Sarah with a library background. So we have two. One is which is lamination is an easy way to preserve documents. And that book tape must be good to use on books. So Sarah, what kind of thoughts do you have on both those points? Well, so we'll start with the point about lamination. So lamination is just kind of the eternal siren song of paper preservation, right? It gives you the sense that you have really strengthened a document when you coat it in plastic and you see what was fragile before can now be waved around willy-nilly. And, you know, children can draw on it and I can get the crayon off and all that good stuff. The challenge, though, with lamination is there are several. First of all, lamination is not a reversible treatment. And in conservation, we care about that a lot. We really want to be sure that whatever steps we take can be undone if we find a better solution in the future. I have an assistant today. Lamination is a process that melts plastic into paper fibers, and it's really quite difficult to undo that once it's been done. So that's one problem to keep in mind. The other thing, though, is that the plastic is often short lived and less dimensionally stable than is the paper that you've coated in. So you kind of introduce more problems when you break plastic into the mix because the paper oftentimes would have lasted longer and remained more stable on its own. I say all that, but also I'll just point out that there really is a tradition to this desire to laminate that ties back into all of these library and archives preservation traditions involving like silking, lining, this goal of putting a supportive surface on a document. There can be good and supportive ways to do that, but lamination is not, unfortunately, one of them. So when people are asking about lamination, how to preserve documents, typically what I tell them is, don't do that, but you can seek out mylar sleeve, an archival plastic sleeve, and that's a great way to keep all the pieces together and it's much less invasive. So that's one note on lamination. And the second was on book tape. So this is a question I've gotten a lot from libraries. In circulating collections especially, libraries oftentimes really need to have a quick fix. And librarians will reach for a product called book tape to affix spines that have fallen off and boards that have fallen off, covers that have fallen off. That product is not necessarily archival standard and it can be very proprietary. So you don't know what you're getting into with book tape. Likely, you're getting a product that's built to last well for maybe five years or so. And if that's the lifespan of your book, then that's all right. But most of us want our books to last for longer than that. So after that, we start to see the tape lifting, leaving sticky adhesive behind that attracts dirt. The adhesive can start to move into the paper or the covering material and it's very difficult to get out. It starts to cause staining and all kinds of problems. So book tape again, it seems like a nice easy solution. It's a little too good to be true. And if people are asking me about book tape, oftentimes I'll say kind of similarly to the lamination. Try looking into book jackets, dust jackets, boxes, enclosures, things that can keep the pieces together more passively than applying tape directly to the object. Perfect. Thanks. Now someone did ask in the chat, is this the line of code book tape? I think there's a couple different producers of book tape out there, correct? Not just, yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, lots of different brands, lots of different types, lots of different proprietary variations. And this is a big issue with tape is that the manufacturers don't have to tell you what's in that adhesive. So you don't know when you don't know what you're putting on the surface that's going to move into the paper and stay there oftentimes for the remaining lifetime of the object. So avoid it if you can. Someone just put in the chat, this is interesting, they said, or in the Q&A, they say they collect old books, the bindings are almost all cloth-covered boards, some bindings are yellow, a few are emerald green. I can't decide what to do about these books. Can I safely read them? They are on bookshelves in my home. Is it okay to leave them there mixed with other books? I would think so. Yeah. But what do you think? Most likely, yeah. If you can take care in reading and handling, they should be good to use and certainly okay to store with other materials nearby. The only storage concerns I would have might be, you know, if you had acetate-based plastics or something like that, but that really moves us more into film and photographic. So without seeing the objects, it seems safe to store with other books and to use gently. Thank you. All right. So we're going to move on now to, it seems like when we did the open call, one of my favorite things is a lot of the things that popped forward were for food-based, which I found mildly fascinating as I was going through the questions that were submitted. So we kind of gathered a bunch of them under the idea of just use of lemon as a general cleaning agent. It seemed like this kind of went across types and objects and anything else. So we're going to just generally talk how people seem to love using lemon for cleaning things and kind of what made the ramifications for different types of objects. I know one of the first ones we talked about was cleaning marble with lemon. And I think either Heather or Courtney might have some thoughts on cleaning marble with lemon. Yeah, I can start. So marble is calcium carbonate chalk, same chemical formulation. It's easily damaged by acids. Women is essentially citric acid, a strong, in the world of acids, it's actually not a strong acid, but it is acidic enough that it will eat into the surface of the marble. And so if you clean with marble, you are clean with lemon on marble. It is effective, but you're removing part of the surface. And it's much stronger than you really need to be in terms of removing the grime on marble. And so practically, conservators are often working in a much more controlled way with acidic or basic solutions. And we like to be closer to the neutral or slightly basic pH when we're cleaning marble because we don't want to be etching into the surface of the stone. But yeah, that general citric acid principle applies across all different types of objects. So women in general is a good cleaning, and you'll see it in all kinds of household cleaning products for that reason. I don't know, Heather, do you have something to add to that? You know, I don't know if I do really, as a group, we had sort of talked about how so many of these cleaning solutions, when it's food-based, I would think that one of the first things you should Google is how acidic or basic is that main component because that is what's leading it to being used as a cleaning product, generally speaking, that people are trying to interrupt the attachment of the dirt to the surface. And when they're looking at something that is acidic, they're usually dealing with mineral-based rust stains, things like that. The marble itself, that's not something they think they're necessarily doing, but in attacking that dirt, they are attacking the marble, which is releasing alongside the dirt. So there's usually some reason that somebody is going for something acidic. It may be rust stains. It may be copper staining, if you see things that are stained blue, like marble stained blue from a fountain. That's, you know, the copper from the pipes being deposited in the marble, and it shows up like a blue pigment. So rust stains, again, the same thing. So acids tend to work on that, where bases tend to work on oily, fatty dirt layers and greases and things like that. So a lot of times, you know, I just sort of start with a simple Google search as to what is, you know, lemon juice or what is vinegar? Is it acidic? Is it basic? And it starts to give you an idea. It's almost always one of those, well, a lot of times it's one of those two things to sort of build a cleaning solution, whereas dish soap is supposed to be neutral. So yeah, so my thoughts on it. There's logic. We've talked about that. There is a logic behind this. There is an actual action at work here. It's whether for historic cultural objects, it's controlled enough. Yeah. Well, I think also too, like we even read about lemon, lemon seems to be very pervasive. Like that's even used in books, right, Sarah? Yeah. So we saw some instances where people had used lemon to reverse highlighter to clean highlighter marks off their books. For example, like, you know, so you've got your college textbooks and you want to sell them back or something and you want to take all that highlighter out. We saw some tips online saying, oh, use some lemon juice to take that highlighter right off. Well, once again, it all comes down to pH. So highlighters are oftentimes made with Pyranine, which is a component that's pH sensitive. We know that lemon juice is very acidic. And so if you hit that highlighter, that Pyranine was something acidic, you will change the color. A lot of dyes function that way. A lot of dyes are very pH sensitive. And so we're very aware of what's going on with pH and conservation treatments to be careful that the dyes are going to behave the way that we intend. But in this case, the answer is yes, but no. Yes, you can, strictly speaking, use lemon juice to clean off highlighter marks, but it isn't good for the paper underneath. Because it's so acidic, it will encourage that paper over time to turn brown and become brittle and really just to age faster than it needs to. So what you've done in sort of seemingly a positive way for the cleaning, for removing the highlighter, really has a negative long lasting impact for the paper underneath. And so it's kind of just a question of keeping the big picture in mind. Yeah, it seems like lemon, it seems like, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, that some of these might seem like short term wins, but in the long term, it's not good for the object, right? When it comes to like using something like a lemon, like I guess it's basically an acidic, you know, and I mean type thing, it can end up hurting that. Is that true? Or is that too much? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm similar to what Sarah was saying with marble, cleaning with an acidic solution. In addition to etching the surface, it sometimes can cause discoloration that doesn't become apparent until kind of later down the line. And so yeah, totally. It seems like a short term win and turns out that eventually it could be aesthetically not even acceptable anymore. Yeah, yeah. And this is actually something that comes up to occasionally people have asked me, Oh, paper conservation, is that like in the National Treasure Movies? Well, not exactly because what you see in the National Treasure Movies actually falls right into what we're talking about right now. They use lemon juice to activate disappearing and reappearing inks. And it's the same concept they're playing with pH, but we would never take something so acidic as lemon juice and put it on valuable documents because of what it'll do to the paper over time. Right. That's it's so funny when movies introduce these concepts to the public. But then like it's like my husband is a former military and he cracks me up for every time he sees a Navy person like with their ribbons. I hear this whole story about how the ribbons are wrong. And then when we watch movies that like like Night at the Museum is always the basic example when they're like, here's all the storage underneath the Smithsonian. I'm always like, what is happening? I see those. So it's it's one of those ideals where again, there's some truth in there. But it's it's, you know, once you get a little bit more knowledge in it, you realize that these things could hurt or they're just not telling the truth for whatever reason. So thanks movie industry. Okay, let's let's move on to our next one. One second. Okay. So our next one we're going to move over to more the leather world. Again, we had kind of ones that I'm going to group together right now just because they seem kind of alike or we can have the same kind of basic conversation. Protecting people asked about protecting leather bindings by applying shoe polish, which is probably very readily available, or the idea of re tanning leather using olive oil and animal brains. Now again, we're trying to figure out if there's some truth to some of these, or if it's all just kind of avoid it. Okay. So Courtney, let's start with you. What are your thoughts on some of these? Well, let's talk about tanning first. tanning. So oil tanning and brain tanning are two legitimate tanning techniques that are used. They're traditional tanning processes that are used primarily by native or indigenous communities. They involve dressing the skin with oil and or brains and then through a process of washing and manipulation and repeated manipulation and wringing it out and working it with metal and bone tools and then stretching it to dry. That's how actually the leather is tanned in the first place. So that is totally legit. The idea of re tanning something down the line is not something that I'm particularly familiar with. So I'm curious if someone asks that question, if they have experience with that, I'd be really curious to hear. It's not something we would do on a historic artifact. It's very, I would consider that to be very invasive at the level of manipulation that would be required. It would be well above and beyond what would be safe for most historic artifacts. And in addition, once a skin is tanned, the collagen starts to break down over time and it becomes weaker. And so that level of moisture introduction and manipulation would just, it would just not be safe for the artifact. But I'm curious in an active use situation as in a piece of regalia or something that's being actively used and worn over and over and something that can be replaced more easily if people are actually doing that. So if somebody has definitely let me know. And then in terms of oiling and dressing leather, everyone loves to oil and dress leather, saddle soap, et cetera, generally not good for the leather long term. And they have, it's nice. Okay, so these things seem really great because when you put them on the leather, they seem like they take a piece of something that's a little bit stiff and sort of give it some flexibility again. And that can be really nice in the short term, but in the long term, a lot of these are oil based products, these proprietary dressings are oil based products and the oils themselves, they often never fully dry. And so they can actually attract pests and dust to your surface. In addition, they start to oxidize over time. And that can cause the leather to become even more stiff than it was originally. And so you're in sort of this like never ending cycle of stiffening drying, not to mention darkening. Darkening is something that very much just real and happens when you apply oil to leather. So in general, you know, on dressing leather, we try to stay away from that as much as we possibly can. Leathers I will say can be sometimes depending on the type of leather be safely waxed. And that is an alternative to oiling or dressing in a situation where you need to improve the saturation visually. The wax can help be a protective buffer. But of course, that's only for a specific type of leather. So like a vegetable tanned leather that has a shiny, compacted surface is going to accept wax in a very different way than a brain tanned or smoke tanned hide will. So very case by case, conservators are very careful to not introduce oils and or, you know, moisture and saddle, saddle soaps specifically also are very alkaline, often very alkaline and leather itself is acidic. And so again, back to this concept of pH, you don't want to be shocking the surface of the leather with something that's very alkaline leather doesn't like that until you're actually accelerating the deterioration by applying it. Are there do you have anything to add? I know you had some thoughts about this as well. Yeah, no, I think Courtney's like, yeah, he hit obviously she's she's done it. I can't improve. I will say that in another another CDC care course that we're doing right now, we talked a little bit about a thing that happens. I just like the name I bring it up any chance I can of this thing called fatty acid spew, which is incorrect me if I'm wrong Courtney, it's basically when almost like the fat gets pushed out of the leather, like it gets oversaturated and it kind of appears I just like the name fatty acid spew. It looks white, it can be easily confused with molds, because of the way that it looks on the surface. And there's this really great blog that was put out by the Alaska State Museum that's called what's the white stuff. If anybody's interested to read it, type that into Google and it'll send you down a rabbit hole of reading about fatty acids spew and mold and how the white crystalline material on leather can be a variety, all kinds of different things, including pesticides and other and other fun gems. Exactly. We see it a lot in leather bindings. There's there's a long history to it, regrettably, but we've actually just been looking in one of my classes this last week. We've been looking at pictures trying to distinguish is this leather spew or is this mold to try and you know get ourselves trained. It can be pretty confusing out there in the real world. Yeah well and the person who was telling us about it Fran Richie, she works with taxidermy type stuff with National Park Service. She was saying that they're trying to figure out kind of what I mean they know what causes it but they were trying to figure out a little bit more about like if a certain type of temperature or you know that kind of environmental condition can kind of do something with it and so far they haven't really had much luck in tying the things together. So that's what that was kind of interesting as well. You know it also happens with chocolate. If anybody's ever seen old chocolate it gets that white kind of film on the surface like same kind of chemical situation happening there. Totally interesting. Okay so we'll get a fatty acid spew which again I could just talk about all day because the name's just fun to say. Okay so this is we're changing gears again now a little bit. Two things that again dealt with food based because again this was a theme throughout all these questions. One was cleaning metal with salt ketchup tomato paste or toothpaste and then removing rust with coke or molasses. So I think we're going to hear some of the same basic theories that we've heard previously but I did want to hear some more. The ketchup thing actually came up in the Q and A as well like about if people use ketchup to clean up on metals. I think it's a good one to hit regardless. Yeah so I guess I'll dive in first. A lot of times what people are trying to clean on metals is tarnish. So if you're talking about silver that's silver sulfide tarnish most frequently it's black it looks dark on the surface it can be disfiguring. It's actually bound to the surface of the metal so it's caused by sulfur in the air so you'll hear conservators talk a lot about how you store your silver because if you can basically eliminate the fact that the silver is exposed to the atmosphere then you can actually keep it from tarnishing. So conservators really love to use things like civic silver cloth that to wrap objects in we use acid free tissue as a barrier often between the metal and the silver cloth itself. We talk about putting metal in plastic containers like polypropylene polyethylene containers or bags that can also help with this but once the tarnish forms on silver it's you know understandable that you would want to be able to take it off because silver is in most cases I will say in most cases not meant to look black and so lots of people reach for all kinds of different acidic solutions to try to take off take off this silver sulfide tarnish and I'll just quickly mention that with brass or a copper alloy it's the same general principle except for the corrosion is different it's an often an oxide corrosion that's just darkening the surface so ketchup is acidic tomato paste is acidic lemon juice like we talked about is acidic these are salsa I've heard salsa before salsa is also acidic you'll hear the combination of like lemon juice plus salt or you'll hear you know all kinds of different there's the always there's also the aluminum foil plus baking soda method of cleaning removing tarnish so all of these are like these homegrown methods that have basis in in science so to remove tarnish conservators often reach for mechanical removal methods first so we like to remove corrosion in the most controlled gentle way that we possibly can and for us that usually means making a slurry of calcium carbonate and working very gently and we like that because we know exactly what's in it and we can control the pressure and the amount of cleaning that word that we're doing on the surface something like a lemon juice plus salt or ketchup or tomato or salsa those are they have some cleaning principles and they're most similar to proprietary dips that you can buy on the market because they're really you're really taking an acid to the surface to remove you're taking a strong acid to the surface to remove that layer of corrosion I'll mention that both with polishing which we like to do and and dips with we like a little bit less you're taking off a layer of the silver itself because it's it's actually bound to the surface and so every time you polish you're taking off a little bit of silver and that actually can be an issue because a lot of objects a lot of objects that are silver are actually plated so they have a base metal underneath and I I have a slide to show actually that illustrates this pretty well I will share my screen quickly okay so on this slide you can see that here are five examples of metals that at first glance look to be silver but they're actually all a little bit different so you can see that the in the top left the sterling silver looks a lot like on the top right the coated gilt silver so there are traces of coating there are traces of gilding there on the left the sterling silver looks like it could have traces of gilding or traces of coating but in this case neither of those are present present and you're just seeing the tarnish pattern and then I'm also including pictures of pewter and niello niello is intentional darkening of a recessed design area and you want to be I mean very very careful because that's easy to remove and it's totally irreversible once you do and then you know gilt silver itself often the gilding is compromised or lost because things have been polished in the past and so it's really important before you ever start to think about polishing or removing tarnish to really understand what your metal is because there are lots of different variations that look super similar um let's see what else can I add to that uh polishing cloths are generally fairly gentle options for you know most people to use and I'll see the baking soda the baking soda aluminum combo that's actually like an electrical electrochemical um electrolytic method of cleaning that's a redox reaction so that's entirely a different react set of reactions but it requires that you immerse the object fully in the solution and for a lot of historic objects that's just not appropriate um anything that has weird hollow areas where moisture could get trapped like a handle or a you know a hollow area of the design um you would you definitely won't want to do full immersion there and it's also very difficult to control you have you know it's happening before your eyes which seems like magic but you also can't reverse it easily so these things are they're um conservators we always like to take a very cautious approach so we're often going to start with the you know the most gentle method and progress up work as we need to right Heather did you have any thoughts about the the use of coke like I find that I know I've watched videos of people putting pennies in coke which my kids love but I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same sort of reactions and some of the things will apply to what Courtney's talking about a lot of um a lot of the distinction between what you might do in the home and what a conservator might do in a studio or lab space is is all about control stopping the the reaction and clearing it to you know the other thing that we worry about a lot even with conservation as we're creating our own cleaning solutions um there's a huge emphasis on what doesn't evaporate from the surface what gets left behind and how do you make sure uh you're taking that away how do you judge the effectiveness of your cleaning always you know if you're cleaning uh with Coca-Cola on a penny can you actually see what you're doing if the cleaning solution is colored coke colored brown um you have no way of judging the effectiveness of your cleaning until it's too late you know I was thinking the yellow it's like my mother's ring here it's got pickling I know Courtney is that really the same thing as the yellow in terms of the pickling solution they put on you know if you drop yeah yeah go ahead you drop this into a bath and start a reaction it it's indiscriminate and my mother's ring would come up with without this shading that happens in the recesses purposeful shading uh so yeah yeah it's in I mean it's like you said too like a lot of these things that you all have said at different times is you either you won't be able to stop the reaction or it's not reversible right so you have to be very careful about kind of what what your experiment or let's say experimenting what you're doing to the object for sure I mean that for me when I'm working with young conservators and teaching them how to clean an object the difference between what we might do is you're always a set of eyes and you're using your discernment what is the effect of what I'm doing you don't want to lose control of it by just letting us a reaction just start to run away you know how do you rinse from the solution but the surgeon goes into an operating room with a scalpel they go in to cut something out of you carefully but that scalpel can hurt you we are using tools and equipments and we're using pH in a way to have an effect and all of these things can also have a harm if they're not controlled properly yeah exactly all right so let's change let's switch back over to the world of books which is always fun to go find out about let's see if I can share my screen again so the next one that came up which was one that popped up was using kitty litter to deodorize books Sarah do you have any thoughts on that it's kitty litter good it's kitty litter bad will it hurt the books the fun I like this one because finally I get to say yes yes you really can do this in a controlled fashion clearly you're using clean kitty litter so the application for this is maybe you've got books that have been through a fire or were stored around a lot of cigarette smoke something like that where it's not a mechanical problem posed to the volume so much as it is that the thing just smells bad and it's kind of driving you crazy kitty litter can work and the way you use this is to enclose the book in a chamber with kitty litter in the bottom of it and just let it sit for a period of days it works because kitty litter at least a lot of kitty letters have in them zeolites and zeolites are a type of molecule that has lots and lots and lots of pores in it that can grab on to impurities in the air and in this case we're using them to grab on to scents that are unpleasant to us and hold it now it's it's not they don't break it down but they do grab those components and hold them and lock them up kitty litter is not the only way to get zeolites we talk about them in a lot of applications and conservation you they zeolites happen um organically like through activated carbon or synthetically like people can make them um you'll find them in little statutes for absorbing um acetic acid off gassing um in collections you'll find them embedded in a product called micro chamber paper that we can use to interleave between acidic papers to help absorb acidic off gassing over time so zeolites are kind of a broad category of of object of material that have a lot of different applications but as far as home applications kitty litter is one of the best places you can find zeolites and so that's why kitty litter really can work to deodorize your books if you need to do that yeah someone said in the q and a which works better kitty litter or activated charcoal so i'm also wondering what's cheaper kitty litter yeah i mean charcoal right you'd have to to price it out yourself i think i mean there's some upper scale kitty litters that i think actually have a little bit of activated charcoal in them um baking soda can work the same way so if you just enclose the volume in a chamber with baking soda and a little reservoir down on the bottom so that it's not sprinkled on your volume and something that you have to clean off later but it's just kept separate and enclosed together in a small area it can do a lot of the same work for you yeah perfect thank you i have a question actually does it matter what type of kitty litter like a clay based or you know because there are so many different types of kitty litters yeah there are so um look for the ones that market themselves as containing zeolites because they're also really effective at soaking up odor as you know kitty waste so um that's a marketing point for those products to say that they're extra odor absorbent and if they're telling you up up front that they've got zeolites in them then you know that's probably effective for your purposes too just don't put it directly on the volume nothing else you confuse the cats okay so let me flip over to this so our next one again going after speaking about kitty litter let's go back to talking about food stuff um so this one came in where it said cleaning of wood furniture with a mix of water baby oil and vinegar and this person said those which did make me laugh a furniture salad dressing is how they said it if that would be at all working and then the other cleaning one that came up that we can talk about a little bit well as well as cleaning quilts with snow so does anyone have any thought on the furniture salad dressing aspect of cleaning for wood furniture um yeah yes uh same with almost the exact same explanation as the leather dressing of really um can seem like a good option at the time can resaturate a surface but also can really damage a varnish can really um eat into the surface of of something um if you're talking about putting something aesthetic on the surface of furniture you really need to understand what those historic finishes are um and there are so many different types of historic finishes and there are so many that have been added to or changed over time that you're dealing with multiple different layers of solubility all at the same time and so um yeah these dressings often have they're often a little bit acidic they often have oil in them that again doesn't fully dry um can cross link can darken the the appearance over time and can also attract grime dust and impact the original finish so uh generally again with furniture same as leather conservators will stay away from from dressing furniture excellent that mouthwash with the mold yeah so I was thinking of that and um you know a lot of furniture does have varnishes that are um related to picture varnishes as well and alcohols there's often um an alcohol in a mouthwash it's probably diluted to the sort of strength that might not hurt the furnace uh finish but alcohols are very effective on on on removing uh coatings that would fall under that category so that would have to be uh something you'd have to think about you'd also have to think about uh what's being left behind what's been put into the mouthwash to make it taste gate to you the mint or whatever the you know flavors that are that are not going to be rinsed off and generally speaking uh alcohols for anything that is uh varnished it for us it's one of our primary solvents ethanol isopropanol things like that that we might use in order to remove a varnish so you could do some serious damage I think with mouthwash to your brain too noted it would smell good but it would smell good and again it might have some effects because it may not dissolve your varnish much like the marble being cleaned a little bit with the lemon but what you're not seeing on a on a different level microscopic level is that you're etching that surface and and if you're going after your furniture with something that's bringing an alcohol to the surface you're not as benign even though you can drink it as you think you are because those things can have an effect on the natural resin coating interesting did you guys did you happen to mention the my recording stop for just a brief minute but do we talk about the quilts cleaning with snow at all is there any proof no but I do I can I I I pull the textile conservator quilts no rugs yes really so there you go um her explanation was that she has done snow cleaning on a rug before snow um works sort of like dry eraser crumbs would work on the surface of a quilt or of a rug sorry not a quilt of a rug because it can kind of work its way down into the fibrous pile structure that's there and loosen kind of shock and loosen grime so yes she has done it before in a very controlled way of course um quilts no you don't have the same kind of fiber structure and so you don't really have a reason to to use that in that way and in fact there's a pretty high risk of damage to the quilt because a lot of quilts have have finishes different types of finishes on them that would be negatively impacted by the snow I don't want to go any further down that line because I'm not a textile conservator but that's the short answer that she gave me totally fine that's fascinating thanks for sharing that see again sometimes there's there's truce maybe slightly yeah translated but hey that's fascinating that's one of those instances it's like the scalpel in the surgeon's hand that's where you're really you're doing some sort of water-based cleaning and aqueous cleaning and you start to as a conservator you start to guess why would that work well because then the water's in a different form so it may be not saturating the structure and be able to filter down through there uh you could argue that a lot of things will ask you to use rain water um and I'm assuming well if they're asking for rain water they're hoping you're not going through our old pipes that is leaching metals and bringing metal ions into the water that you're bringing that could deposit out on there's also two ways where you start to try to get into the head of the person who suggested it where I think you know there's that's really fascinating to watch the way that people are manipulating things without even really necessarily knowing things that we're trying to be more explicit about how do I gel water how do I control water from penetrating how do I keep water only at this interface and you might be doing that with snow and not thinking in the same way that I am but coming up with the same a similar way of handling things so yeah interesting wow more snow and Cleveland now well moving away from snow you guys already got a hint of it so the gentleness of snow to lighter fluid um using lighter fluid or hair spray to remove adhesive from cloth and leather book covers Sarah I think you might have some information on that yes well yeah so um it's so interesting once again to see the the grains of truth here um so when when conservators deal with old adhesives many times we're dealing with situations in which the adhesives have become stiff or brittle have been causing staining and so we'd like to get them out um doing that often requires reaching for solvents and doing some solvent testing to see what solvents have the right parameters to reverse that old adhesive or that old staining that we're working with my hunch here and I don't know for sure but my hunch is that if someone is reaching for lighter fluid or hair spray to address these things what they're trying to reach for is maybe benzene or some kind of alcohol um to um achieve some solvent work at home um and to use a variety of different solvents to see if they can soften and remove an old adhesive um and they might be able to depending on what that adhesive is and what its life has been and how it's been stored they might have some success with that but um Heather I love this metaphor of the scalpel this is a powerful tool right so um if you're able to do solvent testing in a controlled setting with some knowledge of solubility parameters you can identify a solvent that does the most good and the least harm um if you just start throwing stuff at leather and textiles um it's much higher odds that you're going to inadvertently cause some harm even if you reverse the adhesive you can cause further staining and further damage over time to the materials that that adhesive is sitting on um so I I see I think some of the rationale here but it's a risky move and I wouldn't advise it perfect thank you well I'm gonna I'm gonna skip one question let's see if we can get to it at the end because we do have some stuff in the Q&A but um I want to hit this next one because one of our panelists tried it out and I wanted to talk about it so cleaning porcelain you said you did it so now we've talked about it cleaning so so the idea of cleaning porcelain with mayonnaise again food-based like what all the condiments are being covered I think in this talk today um but is there any truth in this so what do you have to say to that Courtney? I was curious I was curious so mayonnaise is an emulsion and mayonnaise is vinegar and oil and egg right so those are you know the egg is the emulsifier that allows the vinegar and the oil to mix and be held together and in conservation we really do like to use emulsions when we're cleaning because it allows us to bring a little bit of water to a water-sensitive surface or a little bit of an oil or a non-polar solvent to the opposite right so we do manipulate emulsions a lot and so I thought hey this kind of seems interesting I'm wondering if this would work um so I have a porcelain sink at home and I tried the mayonnaise I also went down a YouTube rabbit hole of watching people try the mayonnaise the mayonnaise didn't work for me I'll say that it I left it sit on the surface for about an hour because I forgot about it while I was doing other things and then I came back in and rinsed it and there was no change but I would really love to hear if somebody had success with mayonnaise would I do it on historic object absolutely not it's the same principles we've been talking about it's acidic you can't control it in the same way that you can control these other systems you also can't see what you're doing because it's white opaque um and so when I do it on a historic object no am I curious about it to know if somebody's had success yeah totally thanks Courtney I just had to call out that you tried it I thought it was really funny I and well and actually I think that's a good point is you know I keep thinking um it's you can't really do this on on historic objects although I guess the radio carbon testing does kind of do this but if you can try it out of a small piece or something like it one of these things I'd say try it out but not on the actual object right but like if if if there is something that you can be like I don't know let's try it and see what happens you got an old book and you're like let's see what happens when we throw lemon on it you know what I mean like again personal collection you don't mind something happening to it it's the 53rd copy of little women it's nothing you know they mean that you need to worry about give it a shot see what happens I mean I know I do a lot of um disaster and emergency salvage stuff on the side and a lot of the hands-on stuff is throw a book in a kiddie pool see what happens right and then having hands-on of oh this is how you might bring it back to real life so it's I think it's useful sometimes to do these little experiments and see what happens um one question I wanted to hit from the Q&A that just popped up because this comes up a lot is if the material is listed as archival or museum grade is it fine for and they say conservation collection care what are your guys thoughts on that because I've been told something very distinctive on that what you need to look for when it comes to that does anyone have any thoughts I do what are your thoughts Sarah that word archival is about as well regulated as the word organic um it has a lot of implications but in marketing it doesn't have a formal definition so um it depends a lot on whether your vendor and your manufacturer is reputable and and comes sort of from this world as to whether what they mean by archival is really what you want them to mean by archival in terms of books and paper we would look for storage materials that are acid free that are lignin free and maybe that are buffered most times buffered materials are a good choice with a couple of exceptions so that's a more precise way to define what we probably hope that archival means but do you have a little caution around that vocabulary because the the vendors can play a little fast and lose with it sometimes yeah the key words that you said that I've been told to look for is acid free not archival look for something that says acid free and then you're a little bit more because they hope someone in the chat also said PVC free so that's another thing to look for but yeah that that archival word or museum quality is thrown around a lot and you have to really dig down it is like reading a label on a piece of food you know what I mean like where you're sitting there going wait what does that actually mean well we have oh go ahead one other good thing to see if you're dealing with photographs is if materials are marketed as being pat tested or photographic activity test tested that's a good thing that's legitimate and that really does mean archival quality perfect thank you all right so I'm gonna hit the last question that I have in my list which is use of bread seems like this was said a lot for various things so it's use of bread specifically white bread as a cleaning agent and Heather I think you had some insight into that didn't you yeah it is used it's been used in sort of two ways and if you if you are googling I think sort of on the on the broad internet you'll see that people will use suggest bread they'll cut off the slightly stale bread they'll cut off the crust and they're essentially using bread as some sort of type of eraser to absorb some of the dirt into the surface and rolling the sort of crumbs around obviously just like other things we've talked about clearance removing those crumbs from the surface is an issue and one that you have to have thought about before you start doing it the content of moisture in your bread is super important the dryer your bread and I have seen suggestions of slightly stale realize that you're then introducing an abrasive if you have hard breadcrumbs you are abrasive cleaning so so I think you I'm not sure why I would go to bread I will say there's a there is a fairly long tradition and wall paintings of cleaning with bread and a lot of those breads are specifically made for cleaning and I was talking to a Scandinavian friend who was trained in a wall paintings program in Denmark and they were trained to make a bread dough but it is not firmly cooked it's it's it's stickier and they're definitely using this more like what we would consider like a kneaded eraser and they might be putting in I'm trying to remember what it was some sort of copper based product to sort of kill bacteria they were putting in sodium carbonate I think which is soda wash so there they were putting in something there to sort of make it basic and then the description is and you can find this again online too and even on conservation discussion groups of people sharing this recipe it's not cooked in the same way that you're going to buy a loaf of bread from the supermarket and white bread I think is mostly used also again once again you can judge the effect of your cleaning you're not going to be able to tell that on pumpernickel or rye or whole wheat because the dirt that you're probably trying to remove is going to mimic that you know the question always is would you do it and I don't know that I would use stale bread I just don't see the reason to do that I feel like the abrasive qualities and things like that if I was up on some mural on a wall painting and somebody introduced me to the to the the dough the bread dough which is gummier and I thought it really worked I might explore it but I'd always be worried about leaving food on the surface and food on the surface is a source of insects and I don't really need that either you know fly specs on a painted surface are more damaging than other things so I would probably turn to some other form of dry cleaning you know makeup sponges so it's by just something that and even those things you have to they're used and they can be used really effectively and I use them all the time but then I also have to be removing anything that crumbles off of that you know with you know light vacuum not against the surface and a brush you know that's always in that it's yes in the controlled environment yes but be careful about what you're leaving behind but bread actually absolutely historically has been used as a cleaning agent for surfaces that are considered sensitive to water how interesting so again there's I think you know we've hit our hour mark so I think that some of the take-homes for this are some of this stuff does have factual bases with modern technology probably don't use it use some other items I do really appreciate all of your guys thoughts and time that you took into these questions I mean they were just fun to read to be honest just to hear kind of what people have heard some of again some of them were like yep I've heard that before and some of them kind of stumped us for a little bit and got us to do some exploring which I think was a lot of fun so huge thank you thank you Courtney thank you Heather thank you Sarah for taking the time today to talk to us all part of Ask a Conservator Day I'm going to go ahead and close out today's program I did someone said in the chat that the idea of salsa did make them cringe I would agree because like salsa's a little little cringy but um still this was quite fun so thank you again we will be working on our programming for 2023 with CDC care in the next couple months so keep an eye on our website we also had a couple people asking just general kind of how do we work how do we store or care for photos how do we do kind of general questions in the chat we have done a lot of webinars with this program with CDC care I would encourage you to go to our website connecting to collections.org and poke around those archives and there might be a webinar on the question you're asking so uh do go there as well so again thanks you to all three of you thank you to IMLS for supporting our program and I hope everyone has a great holiday and we will see you all in the new year so thanks again and talk to you guys soon thank you thanks