 Okay, hello everybody. This is Mike Morneau from Learning Times. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. I will be your technical producer. If at any point in time you require any assistance with the Zoom platform, please communicate with me using the chat window at the bottom of your screen. And we ask that if you have any questions for our presenter today to please use the Q&A as opposed to the chat. That way we won't risk losing it in the thread. And so chat for tech support, award comments, and Q&A for questions. And the recording is on and we will go ahead and turn things over right away to Robin Bauer-Kilgo. Go ahead Robin. Hi everyone and welcome to another C2C Care webinar. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Mikasuki and Seminole people and their ancestors. And I pay my respect to elders both past and present. So I'm going to start by sharing my screen real quick and then we will get going for today. So you are joining us here for our next, in our free webinar series, which is just how dangerous is that object identifying in managing hazardous materials and museum collections. So we're excited to have you here today. As I said, my name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo. I'm the C2C Care Coordinator and you just saw Mike Morneau who's our Senior Producer from Learning Times earlier. Again, if you have any questions at all during the webinar, feel free to put those in the chat box and we'll get to you as quickly as we can. I always like to do a quick review of our home on the web connecting to collections.org. It is where you'll find all sorts of fabulous information about our program. On there, you will find our past webinar archives and our past course archives. So if you go to that area, you will find a plethora of information when it comes to collections care and collections care just topics. So I would encourage you to do some digging around there if you have a chance. We also have an online community. You can do, you can look around on post questions. The great thing about the online community is that it's open to anyone. You can post a collections care question there and then we have this fabulous group of C2C Care monitors who will actually are conservators who will go out find you a great answer panel group of experts that we have and get back to you in just a few days with some really good advice. So I encourage you to go check that out as well. We also have two places that we live out on social media. They are the Facebook page, which is the link right there on the page and our Twitter feed. So on either one of those, you can get updates on upcoming programming and all sorts of fun stuff we have going on. As Mike said, when it comes to Zoom, I think we're all very comfortable when it comes to the world of Zoom now. But just again, know that we have the chat box for chat. That's just say hello, which you guys are more than welcome to do that now. Say hello where you're from. I would ask how the weather is, but I think most places right now the weather is just hot unless you're lucky enough to be down in like Australia or certain parts of South America. But feel free to do that. If you have a question for our presenter today, use that Q&A box. We really encourage the Q&A box because it allows us to keep track of the questions during the webinar. You can ask questions at any point and we will be sure to get to them by the end of the webinar as long as time allows. I'll also note that I turned on the live transcription tool for this webinar. So if you look down and look at the closed captioning, you should be able to load that onto your computer as well. So a couple of quick notes about upcoming programming before we start today. We do have another free webinar coming up on July 29th. That's called choosing materials for museum storage to actually go register for that. Again, that free webinar, just go to connecting to collections.org. Go into the webinar area and you'll be able to click on it and register for it. We're looking forward to that one because it's going to discuss all types of fun storage issues that you might have or choosing materials for proper storage for museum collections. It's an important thing. And then the other thing we have going on is a C2C care course. Now courses are slightly different than webinars. Courses do cost a little bit of money, but it's a much more in-depth look at the topic that we're going to be covering. It consists of five, we're actually six now, separate presentations and meetings with course subjects and experts in their area. We kind of thought this was great timing because today we're going to be talking about the fun of hazards in collections. That course is actually going to cover health and safety in collections care. And for a special little preview, we had Karith Koss-Schrager who's going to be the course coordinator on that, record a little promo for us to kind of describe what's in the course. So I'm going to go ahead and play that now. And once it's done, I'll pop back on the screen and we will get started on today's program. So just have some patience, listen to this promo and see if maybe you'll be interested in carrying on with this. If you're interested in more detail on the topics that were covered in today's presentation, please join us for our six-week online course, Introduction to Health and Safety and Collections Care, which will be offered from July 20th to August 24th. Our speakers include collection care workers and health and safety professionals who will discuss their collaborative experiences working with hazards in museums. Each week we'll focus on a different topic related to understanding and handling hazards, which will allow participants to establish the protocols to create a safe work environment. Week one addresses understanding hazards in collections. This will be a general overview of the principles of occupational health and safety with emphasis on the particular hazards found within museums and other cultural heritage and collecting organizations. Week two focuses on understanding roles and responsibilities. We will provide an introduction on how federal, state, and local health and safety regulations apply to your workplace and how to identify the proper health and safety professionals to help with your specific needs. Week three will talk about risk assessment. This means how do you identify hazards within your workplace and collections? What exactly does exposure mean and are you really at risk from that exposure? Week four and five are risk management protocols, the things we really need to know to protect ourselves and others. There will be an overview of general procedures and policies for the control of exposure once hazards have been identified. This includes proper object handling techniques, selection of personal protective equipment, establishing hazard communication, and understanding waste disposal. In week six, we will include with case studies and a panel dissection. This includes a lightning round of real-world examples highlighting health and safety problems in collections care. We hope to provide lots of areas for participant discussion to cover the specific needs of small and mid-sized organizations, which we know often lack professional health and safety resources. And by the end of the course, you have completed a management plan for one hazard or one hazardous collection material that you have identified within your organization. To sign up, look for registration information through CTCC, and we look forward to seeing you in July. But we hope that you will be interested in that program. Again, it's a CTC care course. It's going to be fun because there's going to be a combination of presentations plus kind of basically small group meetings where we'll actually walk you through how to create, how to deal with those hazards. And I know especially in the world, I'm a contract registrar, along with many of you guys, I work within that field. Learning about health and safety has been kind of a thing that I just kind of learned on the job. So I think having folks who specialize in it, it'll be really useful to kind of learn things if you're kind of interested in developing that. Go to our website, sign up for it. And for I think until July 8th, it's actually at a slightly less registration fee. So I would encourage you to do it. So now I'm going to go ahead and hand control over to our presenter today, Hailey Monroe, where we're going to be learning about how to identify and manage hazardous materials and museum collections. Again, this is probably going to be a nice little taster for kind of what the course will be covering another month, but we're excited to have Hailey here because she is an expert in this area as well. Hailey is an objects conservator currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia. At the Museum of Vancouver, she oversaw the identification and management of hazardous materials and collections, a subject that she continues to work on, as it frequently overlaps and influences not only conservation treatments, but also exhibition designs, storage, housing practices, and how collections are approached and accessed by visitors and staff alike. I'm going to go ahead and hand you guys over to Hailey and we'll see you back at the Q&A at the end of it. Feel free to go ahead and share your screen whenever you're ready, Hailey. Thank you so much, Robin. And okay, just give me a moment here to share this. Here we go. All right, is that showing up correctly for everybody? Looks perfect. Perfect. Okay, wonderful. So thank you again and I'm really happy to be here. My name is Hailey Monroe and I am currently working at the Museum of Vancouver. And before I go any further, I do just want to acknowledge that here where I live and work in Vancouver, British Columbia is the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Slewa-tooth nations. So just to summarize, today in this webinar, I'll be covering the following topics. It's impossible in 45 minutes, obviously, to go over everything. And I think Kara's course is going to be amazing. So this will just be like a taster, a kind of introduction to the topic of hazardous materials and collections and kind of how to approach it and what to do about it. So why is it important to consider hazardous materials? I've always really appreciated this quote from the AIC Health and Safety Committee. It really helps to put into perspective why we really need to care about this. So it says here, unlike industrial workers who are likely to encounter higher doses of potentially hazardous materials, resulting in acute exposure, museum workers are more likely to be exposed to low level doses of heavy metals and other toxins over an extended period of time, resulting in chronic health problems. And, you know, as I'm sure all of us know, we often work in collection spaces for long periods of time. And we're really in and around these objects constantly. So it's really important to kind of think about what materials are we around and encountering constantly and how can we limit our exposure to certain hazards. So here are some images just to give you an idea of how routine exposure to hazardous materials can be while working in a collection space. Here in these photos, you can see myself and my colleagues engaged in just normal daily museum tasks. We have some exhibition prep, object photography. We comply with WorkSafe BC requirements. So if we identify something in the collection that needs to be dealt with, such as the stove, which was suspected of containing asbestos, so we needed to wrap it, as well as like storage reorganizations, basically anything where you're shuffling objects around. And in all of these cases, we were aware that we were in were exposing very close proximity to specific hazards. So it is really kind of a daily occurrence. So what exactly makes a material hazardous? So when we say something is hazardous, that can mean many things. I when I go through old records, I'm often running into labels with vague warnings like danger or poison, which give a little additional explanation. But really what we're talking about when we say that something is hazardous, it can be broken down into roughly three categories. You have chemical hazards, physical hazards, and then some biological hazards. So chemical hazards are toxic or what we would consider poisonous. And toxicity itself is a wide ranging phenomenon. You can have toxins which cause short term acute effects on the body. You can also have toxins that cause longer term or less immediate obvious effects because they accumulate and cause damage over time or later on these might be carcinogens, toxins that cause reproductive damage, there are toxins that cause damage to developing fetus. So there are a lot of ways in which chemicals can interact with the body in negative ways. And so things that we might consider toxic chemical hazards within a museum collection or a heritage collection would be pesticides, preservatives like formaldehyde, heavy metals, which appear in a wide variety of forms, ethnobedanical toxins, and things like that. Physical hazards on the other hand are not toxic per se, but they harm the body physically. So these include things that are flammable or explosive, such as cellulose nitrate, pressurized objects that might explode and cause physical damage. Things as simple as sharp edges, also asbestos, which causes accumulated physical trauma inside the lungs, as well as radioactive materials. And then biological hazards include infectious substances. So one thing, for example, is in the western United States, huntivirus, which is spread by mice is a worry in collection spaces. Biological hazards can also include hazards can also include other pathogens. I've worked on objects, especially neon signs that have come in from the outside that are covered in bird droppings. And there are many pathogens that can be harbored there, which we need to be cautious of, as well as things like mold, which can be toxic and affect people in different ways. If you have a sensitivity to mold, you can actually become quite sick versus another person who might not become as sick as quickly. And so hazardous materials are extremely common in collections. In the conservation field, we're very aware of certain things. We tend to be particularly on the lookout for pesticides and toxic pigments. But the range of hazards is really quite broad. So I have a list here of just a selection of things that you might frequently run into. And this includes those inorganic and organic pesticides, preservatives for wet specimens, like if you have a natural history collection, heavy metals, like I mentioned, occur in a huge variety of ways, not just pesticides and pigments, but you can also have mercury felted hats, arsenic green pigments from the 19th century, lead shows up in a wide variety of ways. The corrosion products of lead and cadmium especially are quite toxic, like with mercury, geological specimens. And then you have asbestos. And then you have strange ones like pharmaceuticals and patent medicines, which are often a very weird mix of heavy metals and toxic botanical extracts. There are also ethnobotanical toxins, which I'll mention, we have some of those in our collection where you have like poison darts, which are potentially quite dangerous, then chemical hazards such as actual chemical collections, or household products, cleaning products, historical cleaning products, things like that. Also the grenade style bomb glass extinguishers, which we don't have a good photo of one of those, but those are an interesting one where some of them contain carbon tetrachloride, and some museums have written about how they're trying to handle those. And then pressurized and explosive things like fire extinguishers, fire crackers, firearms and ammunition, which hopefully are decommissioned, but always want to double check that. Deterioration products, especially from plastics, can be quite nasty. And then radioactive objects. So it's just kind of a sampling. There's a huge, huge range. So where do you really start with your own collection? How do you go about evaluating what you, evaluating what you have? You really, you can't really manage what you don't know is there. So the steps of locating and identifying hazards in your collection is really important. And it can be overwhelming, especially if this is not sort of your area. So the very first place to start is research. There is a wealth of resources available, which are extremely helpful and really help to build up a familiarity with hazards, especially within the context of collections. And as well as, as information from other institutions about what they have done to manage hazards. They talk about what they've identified, what they've done to manage them. Historical information can be really, really valuable. Just to know, for example, the timelines of when were certain pesticides used and can that help inform you of what you ought to be looking for when were certain pigments used, if that's something you're examining. You can also, there's a lot of information about toxicological data on various specific substances. So you can kind of get a handle on how dangerous are any one of these things. And research can really also help point you in the direction of some easy identifications that would otherwise be a little bit obscured. So patent medicines and pharmaceuticals, for example, sometimes they're really, really obvious. Like here, this is one of my favorite objects that we have tablet number 93, iron, arsenic and strickening pills. I don't know what good that's going to do for you when you swallow it, but that, you know, it's right there on the label. We know exactly what it is. It's well sealed. We're not terribly concerned about it, but we know what's there and we know to treat it with the proper, proper respect. And then we have here a bottle of Kalamel and it just by glancing at it, don't really know what Kalamel is, do a little bit of reading about the patent medicine industry, quickly realize that Kalamel was a very, very common prescription medicine prescribed to people and it's mercury. It's a mineral that contains mercury. And so once you know that you can go through your collection and find how many times Kalamel shows up, which can, it was very, very common. So it shows up a lot. And once we were able to kind of tease apart these various names that are not necessarily very obvious, we then are able to pull apart and say, oh, wow. Okay. So for example, these are all mercury containing products in our collection, just a sampling of those. So really research really helps to kind of disambiguate what you're looking at in a very easy way. So once you have an idea of what you're looking for, the next most useful task is to explore your collection and survey it. This includes walking the aisles and storage, going through your, your object records. I was able to find a lot of records in our collection, for example, with historical notations of toxic or poison, whether this was something that had been treated with a pesticide or an intrinsically toxic object, such as some of the arrows and darts. So that was also very, very helpful. But just making yourself familiar with the collection once you have hazards in mind. This is a good way to catch both easy to identify hazards, such as in this, this top image here, I have adverse precatorious seeds, which are those bright red and black seeds, they're, they're very common. And highly, highly toxic, if you were to ingest it or the powder that falls out of them, because they're often drilled as beads. So that's a very easy identification. Also uranium glass is a very easy identification just with a simple UV light. Nothing fancy, even just like a pet detector UV flashlight is enough to cause the, the luminescence, very easy ID. And surveying and walking the aisles is also a really, is the best way to then compile a list of likely or suspected hazards, meaning those that you cannot identify with the naked eye, but which you would require, which for which you require testing. These include objects that you suspect might be treated with pesticides, commonly inherently hazardous objects such as taxidermy specimens, or felted top hats and bowlers, which are often, but not always treated with heavy metals. This also might be a way to find objects that might be, might contain ethnopotanical toxins. So it's a good way to make a list to plan for the next step. And finally, we have analytical testing. So a lot of hazardous materials can only be identified by analytical means, meaning you can't tell by the naked eye if what you have in front of you is toxic. And two very useful techniques, these are not the only techniques, but two very useful techniques are X-ray fluorescence, which is XRF, and gas chromatography mass spectrometry, which is GCMS. XRF is a noninvasive technique used for detecting elements, and in the context of hazardous materials is particularly good for detecting heavy metals. We're very interested in finding arsenic, mercury, and lead especially. It can't identify compounds, so you're just looking for those elemental signatures, but in the case of heavy metals, it's kind of all, you kind of really need to know initially. GCMS on the other hand is minimally invasive, meaning you do have to take a sample, usually it's just a swab. And this is particularly useful for identifying organic compounds. And for our purposes, this includes organic pesticides such as DDT, naphthalene, pentachlorophenol, any of those, as well as those ethnobotanical toxins such as Karare, or Strychnine, or other things. Now of course the issue with analytical text testing is that many institutions or most institutions don't have this equipment on hand, but this doesn't mean that it's impossible. In many cases, it's possible to arrange for testing. Larger institutions and universities often have facilities or equipment that they're happy and willing to loan out. They'll often send someone like with a PXRF to help you with that kind of survey work. And they will, so you can often arrange to have samples run sometimes for a fee, but it's usually not too difficult. For example, here in Canada, CCI, the Canadian Conservation Institute, offers its services to museums for sample testing and for these two techniques in particular. So to kind of give you an idea of the range of identifications you can make, I'm just going to quickly show you sort of three batches of objects that use these techniques that we had here in the museum. So I'll start with the visual and otherwise straightforward identifications. So here we have this range of objects. You can probably already tell from the picture that some of them are very obvious, but when we went through it, basically what we had, we had a vial of cocaine. We had some strychnine. The label was very difficult to read, so we had to kind of use some photography techniques to kind of read the label. It became clear that it was strychnine. We have tablets that are very obviously labeled poison, so it's kind of a freebie. We have objects containing liquid mercury, cellulose nitrate in many forms. This tin is actually labeled pyroxylene, so just to quick dive into what that term means, quickly reveals that that is cellulose nitrate. There are liquid preservatives, those abras precatorious seeds that I mentioned, naphthalene. Sometimes you can smell it. It's a very strong chemically odor, and sometimes as an example here with the insects, you'll have the cotton roll where the flakes or the mothballs were kept, but it has sublimated away, but that's an indicator that it was there and is still kind of possibly still in that space, that box. Uranium glass and radium painted dials are also very easy to identify. Here we have some objects which we tested with XRF, so for these we are specifically looking for heavy metals. We have lead paint everywhere. Lead paint is so ubiquitous, so I just have a neon sign here as a kind of example for that. Mercury containing pigment, so pigments that are mercury sulfide, so either cinnabar or vermilion which are chemically identical. We have powdered pigment which includes that lacquers which are tinted with mercury sulfide to make them bright red, painted northwest coast masks and other objects are often painted with mercury sulfide. The taxidermy collection was largely very toxic, mostly arsenic and mercury and some lead. There were some non-toxic specimens mixed in, so it was good to be able to figure out which ones of those were not toxic. We have this bonnet, beautiful green bonnet here which is one of those copper arsenic dyes. We found a fair number of silks that are made with this arsenic pigment, and then the felted hats which are largely made with mercury. We also found we wanted to contrast with our silk top hats and discovered that many of them are actually quite high in arsenic, so that was an interesting one and again something we wouldn't have noticed unless we went through and surveyed the collection. Then we have feathered decorative features on hats. We found that when it was just feathers it was often a zinc-based pesticide. If it is the whole bird or a bird's head, especially from the Victorian era, it usually is very high in arsenic. There are the labels. Then for GCMS, so here we're looking for organics and we have a mixture of pesticides and those ethanol-botanical toxins. The chilkat blanket here has DDT and naphthalene on it. You actually can't smell the naphthalene anymore, so it was interesting to find out that it was in fact still there. The wooden carving had been treated with pentachlorofenol and then we have two sets of darts here, one with anteros toxicaria and then one which we are hoping to have tested but based on the database records and the provenance we suspect it is actually this interesting beetle poison from the San people in sub-Saharan Africa and we have a little pot of karare. Once you've got your identification out of the way, what next? How dangerous are these? Do you need to be afraid of all of these objects? And this is a really interesting question and for some yes and for some not so much and it really is about becoming familiar with the level of risk posed by all of these objects. Here I just have this image from 1859 from a medical journal and it shows the ulceration caused on workers hands who were working with those copper arsenic greens that in this case shields green and it kind of just points to the toxicity of that compound. So when evaluating the danger posed by an object it's important to keep in mind the difference between hazard and risk. Essentially this refers to the fact that just because a material is hazardous, the fact that a material is hazardous is different from how likely it is to cause harm. And this can become quite complicated and industrial hygienists in particular are people who can really provide detailed guidance on this and are very worthwhile to work with. But there are things we can do before we need or are able to engage the services of outside health so I'll go into a few things here. So here are some examples of very different routes of exposure of various hazards. So here we have that dart again that is has Antares Toxicaria toxin on it. We had this tested by CCI and in their report they were careful to note that this toxin is still active and that we should be cautious, highly cautious with these darts and that the only way you're going to harm yourself is if you were to you need to break the skin so you actually need to get poked by this dart. That of course is very very unlikely however if that were to happen you are actually in some serious danger. So it's an interesting case where just handling the object moving it around on the shelf putting it on display. These are not necessarily really risky actions but to be extremely mindful not to jab yourself and so we have handling restrictions on these we really don't want people handling them for no reason. On the other hand we have this arsenic green bonnet this pigment is the dermal exposure can can be quite quite nasty. How nasty it is as now after over a hundred years have passed and some of the pigment has rubbed off it's hard you know it's hard to tell but we really don't want to be handling this without gloves. We tend we certainly require gloves in a lab coat we tend to require a respirator just out of an abundance of caution. We have the averse precatoria seed again which is most dangerous if you were to chew and swallow it. Again highly highly unlikely however there are accounts of people especially those who who make these seeds into beads becoming quite ill from the powder that comes out of them. Whether or not that is likely to happen in a museum setting is hard to say however all for these you always want to wear gloves really don't handle them very frequently and always always wash your hands after handling these. And then we have a radium dial here which is radioactive. Gloves lab coat are not going to protect you in this case but for radiation really it's about distance and limiting exposure both the exposure as a factor of time duration as well as distance. And then so hazards can sometimes the same hazard in this case I'm going to give an example of mercury can present the same hazard can present in different ways. So all of these objects here contain mercury which is very common in collections and appears in a wide range of forms again from pigments and pesticides to elemental liquid mercury. And the presence of mercury depending on what compound it is found in also influences how toxic it is and how it enters your body. So it's it can get a little complicated. So here we have a we have a selection and I've kind of arranged them and how we at the museum have ranked them. But basically what we have here we have stable pigment so this is again mercury sulfide so pigment in in intact paint layers for example this mask here and pigment which is bound within lacquer. Mercury sulfide does emit mercury vapor that is the main root of exposure when you have mercury sulfide. It's the dermal exposure it's not a huge deal you want to avoid if it's not a huge deal really what we're looking at is inhaling mercury vapor. So these objects they're very easy to bag we open them in a fume hood just to just to kind of reduce the amount of vapor we are interacting with. We then have the patent medicines which we are also quite cautious of they tend to be very well sealed so not an immediate danger however if they were to break and spill there is where you know a little bit wary of those often because not only do they contain in this case this one contains mercury but they also often contain toxic botanical extracts as well whether that's belladonna or strychnine or something else so it's kind of a combination of of ingredients for which we don't know the we don't know what the the dosage is in these containers we don't know the amounts and we kind of don't know what would happen if one of we one of these were to break so we're quite cautious of these. Then the next step up we have mercury pigment that's loose so we have this powdered pigment on this palette here obviously that poses quite a risk of trans you can transfer onto your hands and your gloves and if you're not cautious maybe you're touching your face or the doorknob so that that is quite we want to avoid that it'll as much as possible we also have mercury liquid mercury containing instruments which again once they're when they're sealed and sound not initially dangerous if these were to break it's a larger quantity of mercury and again we're concerned about that mercury vapor. We also here at the Museum of Vancouver because we're beneath we're within we are within the City of Vancouver system we our work safe VC does not allow us to work with exposed liquid mercury so liquid mercury in particular we're quite cautious of we don't we don't want to be put in a situation where we have liquid mercury out and about. We then have taxidermy specimens which again it's a transferability issue that powder can really it can get on your gloves on your lab coat on the workspace you're working on and same with the mercury hats so these we really try to have very strict handling procedures and storage procedures with these and then the last one is a leaking liquid mercury instrument and again because of the City of Vancouver restrictions we actually cannot interact with this object we also don't really know how much mercury is or would come out of it so we have bagged and sequestered this this object for now but it kind of gives you an idea for just even with a single a single hazard such as mercury you have a wide range of situations to deal with so how do you deal with them what what should you do once you've identified all of these these materials and all their different forms and different conditions so I'll kind of go over some I'll spend the rest of this talk going over some straightforward steps that you can employ to improve the safety within your workspace and to reduce exposure that's the main goal is to reduce exposure and these steps can be taken no matter your budget as they they require inexpensive materials not really not going for really fancy solutions here but just practical solutions that can really reduce the risk to yourself and and people working with you of course I don't have time to dive into the much broader picture of wider risk management and workplace safety and of course as as Robin mentioned that will be in Carrith's course later this summer which will be an excellent resource for that but I'll give you a place to start here so basically what I'm going to go over are the the importance of labeling and database records the storage and housing upgrades which you can make as well as safe working practices including PPE your personal protective equipment so one of the most important things you can do once you've really taken a deep dive into your hazards is to make sure that this information is passed along how do you transmit this information to other people in your institution you want this to be available and you want it to be readily usable and and interpretable by other staff members interns anyone you have working with you and so this includes physically tagging objects with labels that include the pertinent information such as the hazard present it's also nice to have handling requirements or restrictions so like if you must wear a respirator to interact with this object it's nice to have that on the physical label so someone can see that immediately color coding can be really helpful I am really cautious not to overuse symbols like the skull and crossbones I think sometimes they're or I've seen older labels that tend to just use skull and crossbones for any any kind of danger but it's it's good to limit the use of that symbol because it dilutes the meaning if you overuse it and it's really important and useful to save that one for when you really really need it for items that are acutely dangerous and so you can see that sometimes when you start tagging things you end up with some alarming alarming visuals like this this shelf of hats that we that we have here in the case of the hats the warning is justified we we really don't want people reaching into this shelf we want people to handle these very very carefully we want them suited up when they're working with these the ultimate goal is to house these hats individually we have since sequestered off this shelf just to keep people again from brushing into it but the this a good starting point was to just tag everything so in addition to your physical tags it's really important to follow up with some kind of records whether or not this whether this is a whether you have a database where you can place these records or in some kind of object register just to have a place where this information all this information goes and goes in a standardized form it's really important to have a place where this information goes and goes in a standardized form it's really important so I have a couple examples from from our own database here and it's important to mention again the hazard that is present so what is someone going to encounter when they go to retrieve this object in this case this mask it's it's lead paint we have a color coded flag at the top so when you see that banner when you first pull up pull up the list of objects that banner for that single object will be a different color which is a really good visual cue kind of alerts the user that they're that there's something they need to to be aware of we also we list the date of testing and the results from that testing to give people a reason why we're saying that that's this object has led and is and it contains a hazard we also include any any requirements or restrictions so we have the tagging instructions so if the tag fell off someone had to retag this object they know how to retag this object they know how to handle this object whether or not PPE is required and this in this case there are no restrictions this this the paint is sound this isn't a particularly risky object to interact with but anything like that would be included here in contrast this also is a lead this object contains lead but this one we're far more concerned about this is a very poorly sealed bottle of flake white or lead white full of powder and that stopper is just loose it's not sealed it's not sealing anything up so this has a red flag we have much stricter handling requirements on this you must be wearing full PPE we really don't want people retrieving this object for no very good for no good reason the housing we also house this object much more differently I'll talk about the housing in a couple slides but so as you can see this this object is is flagged differently in the database so you can kind of follow up all this information with changes to your storage and housing practices again to reduce exposure so this can be as simple as preventing unnecessary contact with objects by storing them in boxes or polyethylene bags you can almost so limit access to a location in storage for example we have sequestered our taxidermy collection so that you don't need to walk through it to get to anything else we you would also perhaps want to do that with a radioactive collection you also don't want to bunch radioactive objects together if you have a large number of them you can produce a hotspot but to just move those away from highly trafficked areas is a good idea you can you can limit exposure to vapors and but by bagging items as I mentioned with the objects painted or containing mercury sulfide some materials don't like to be bagged cellulose nitrate for example but it's kind of a different different case it sort of deteriorates more quickly if you do that but for for mercury containing objects that's a good idea we also bag our radium dials the radium painted clock faces because those emit as the radium degrades goes through radioactive decay it emits radon gas and being a basement storage space already radon gas is quite heavy we kind of just want to limit how much of that is pooling in our space so we also bag those and open those again in a fume hood so it's also just another way to again reduce overall exposure protecting fragile objects is really is really important so we for example are in a seismic zone so we have earthquake barriers not on every shelf but especially shelves that contain objects not only objects that are just fragile but objects that are both fragile and contain a hazard so things that contain liquid mercury the patent medicines are wet specimens all of those we have behind earthquake barriers so that if we were to have a shake hopefully those don't fall out of the shelf we also tend to house those in objects like that in padded boxes again to just provide a little bit more protection and it also makes handling safer safer and easier so here in the photos just some examples here we have these are our taxidermy birds which we have housed in boxes that we can see through so we know it's easy to identify which bird is there they each have their hazard tag as you can see there's a mix of yellow and red tags the yellow specimens either tested negative with the xrf or didn't register much of anything the red tags had lots of arsenic mercury and lead and then we have our patent medicines here they are behind an earthquake barrier which can just see at the bottom of the picture they're also housed in boxes and there's at the foam between all the bottles just so everything nothing is loose none of these we try to make sure that none of these items are loose so having hazardous materials in your collection it can be nerve-wracking but it doesn't mean that you can't work with them so just like safe housing and storage practices employing safe working practices also greatly helps to reduce your exposure to yourself and your staff and there are a number of just simple steps that you can take just to make your working practices safer this includes only working with hazardous collections when you need to so avoid unnecessary contact when you are working with hazards that pose a high risk of cross-contamination again we'll use taxidermy as an example work within a quarantine zone so if ideally lay down some polyethylene sheeting on the table you're working on to ensure that that you're not contaminating the table try to avoid touching too many other things like avoid touching the door knobs your pencil the computer or if you do wipe it down afterwards so really clean up after yourself and clean your space afterwards it's really important to wipe down your areas if you can wipe down the surfaces or ideally vacuum with a HEPA filtered vacuum just just to again reduce cross-contamination and you also want to be wearing appropriate personal protective equipment now PPE is your last line of defense you don't want it to be the only thing protecting you again you want to avoid unnecessary contact use your quarantine spaces so you're not just having hazardous materials out like in the central table and then you use your PPE to really just make sure that you yourself are also safe and so you really want to have the basics on hand you want nitrile gloves lab coats fitted respirators which are different than dust masks the fitted respirators really the only air you can breathe must come through the filters so this is really important especially if you're working with heavy metal pesticides and there are different filters for those so if you're working with particulates you want particulate filters if you're working with vapors so for example lots of naphthalene or solvents you really want vapor organic vapor filters on your fitted respirator but you definitely want these respirators available and they do need to be individually fitted to the individual person you should also have you know if you do have a lot of toxic materials in your collection it's a good idea to have a few Tyvek suits around just in case sometimes when we're working with taxidermy we do suit up completely it's it's safer but it's good to have your variety of PPE available at all times and so in combination having your safe handling practices your safe working practices your PPE and your safe housing you can really greatly reduce your exposure to these hazardous materials and in your daily work and so finally of course is I kind of I kind of mentioned this already but personal and workspace hygiene are kind of the final the final step you really want to be cleaning your workspaces you want to your contaminated lab coats don't just go place it over your office chair don't drape it over your chair we should be collecting contaminated lab coats and having them laundered contaminated gloves should be taken off properly so inside out to keep the contaminated surface on the inside if you're working with especially heavy metals a lot it's much better you really want to dispose of these materials safely and not to just add them to the general waste stream so we collect our hazardous waste so gloves contaminated packing materials we rehoused a lot of our taxidermy and so there was a lot of tissue and plastic wrapping and things that we deemed unusable again we couldn't clean them to any extent to be confident to use them again so all of these materials we gathered and placed in bags in a bin that we see here and we arranged for it to be picked up by a specialized company who can take toxic waste away and it is a little bit of a cost but it it's it's ultimately worth it you're not putting these heavy metals back into the waste stream and they can be disposed of properly and so with all of these practices in place you really can work safely and confidently with your your hazardous collection and reduce your exposure and really still be able to enjoy and work with with your collection and so I think that is about it I hope this has been helpful um again I realized that in 45 minutes it's hard to cover everything so this really was just just a taste of of the world of hazardous materials and and what you will what you can encounter and what needs to be done and yeah I hope you enjoyed that and I'd be happy to answer any questions so thank you thanks Haley that was great and that was exactly you know I I feel like with a lot of this you hit two real big key points which are just trying to identify what's in your collection that could have these things and also don't be scared of your collection but that's always the thing I feel like is I feel like when I learned about this and then when I learned about like copyright type issues I was like well I can't do anything with the collection now you know what I mean so I think it's just more learning about it and having that knowledge or two incredibly important things um well we already have questions in the q&a people are just coming away in it so I'm going to encourage our audience to add more questions if you think we need to cover something if you have a question for Haley I'm just going to start going down them and we'll just start tackling them one by one and we'll see kind of where the conversation leads if that sounds good to you perfect um one of the first ones that came in is I says I work in a chemistry museum and I intend to assess the collection of chemicals most of them are in bottles from the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century I don't feel confident touching bottles even with gloves on the other hand there are no other collections of chemicals in my area do you have any recommendations on where to start and what to do that must be that must be super fascinating um and yeah you're I can only imagine that you have a huge range of chemicals to deal with um and yeah chemicals come in such a wide a wide variety um I I believe there are quite a few collections out there maybe not in your area but collections that do exist that do specialize in um in uh like laboratory chemicals or industrial chemicals um there are also medical collections out there that also tend to have a large a lot a lot of just what we would consider chemicals um and I think those are good places to start people are often very responsive if you just just cold email them to try and get some information I can't think of any publications off the top of my head that that deal strictly with with chemical collections but there are a good place to start even even looking up the names of the chemicals you're dealing with um what could be interesting is if you're dealing with 19th century or early early bottle early items um names have changed um and it's so even just start start googling start researching the the names on bottles just to get a sense of like what are you dealing with are you um and when you pull up information online um like you can easily pull up um the safety data sheets of of chemicals and they will give you really clear indications of what the risks what the dangers of any of these any of these chemicals are they'll have that hazard diamond with the the colors that tells you about toxicity to yourself flammability transportation issues just to get your get a handle on which of these chemicals are really dangerous which of these chemicals are not so dangerous and probably not difficult to handle um and yeah it is it is scary handling by especially when you're by yourself and you're just you know trying to just physically work through um a collection like that definitely for handling I would recommend like using trays and carts versus like taking off a shelf and walking with bottles um always always have a surface that you can place something on um and uh yeah yeah I think that's gonna be really really fascinating I wish you luck with that um but definitely reach out to people there there are people out there who really specialize even chemistry departments honestly um at universities or other places I'm sure there are people there are I'm sure people who specialize in historical chemicals and will be fascinated and really excited to to help you out so that university idea is a super good idea because I feel like whenever I've always been really stuck like even when it came to identifying bugs pests I've been like ooh the university you know what I mean and usually you can find someone that can kind of help you definitely so I think that's a really good call we had someone come to look at our geology collection it was a grad student from a local university who came to look at our geology collection because she knows rocks far better than we know rocks and that was super helpful so yeah um someone asked why were the hats treated with arsenic or mercury so for the hats that you showed earlier so the mercury ones are felted fur so that's like your traditional um Alice in Wonderland mad hat or hat so those were manufactured using using mercury that uh long story short when you're making felt you're trying to rub fibers together and certain chemicals make that far easier one of them happens to be mercury nitrate it kind of turns hair or fur into spaghetti and it just it belts far easier and you get like a really really nice product it just happens to then be super toxic afterwards because they don't rinse out the mercury um so it's just kind of a byproduct of the manufacturing process the arsenic is an interesting one um and we're still kind of researching that I was talking to some people at the vna um and a few other places and what we think we're looking at because we're pretty sure we're not looking at pesticide treatment we have no record of arsenic being used in our collection and nowhere else are we finding strange readings for arsenic certainly not at that level so we're not seeing a pattern it just happens to be these brushed silk or woven silk collapsible top hats and we might be looking at a window in time in the aniline dye industry when arsenic was part of the mordanting process maybe maybe we're still we're still digging into that but again we think it's an it's an artifact of the manufacturing process but I'm consistently fascinated with how like people and I'm sure we're still doing it I'm sure in like 50 years we're gonna find something like common that we use they're gonna be like why didn't we yeah but at the same time like especially it feels like at that early part of the industrial age people were just finding all this new stuff and being like this stuff works great it works great yeah and then it finds out like it'll like kill you like essentially you're doing something and it's just it's fascinating to me that we're like that um this I've actually had but had this happen to me it says it says is it common practice to rid medicine bottles of their liquid if they contain substances such as chloroform or opium or do you leave the liquid in the bottle and store it in a certain way if you should get rid of the liquid how do you go about that so I'm curious to hear what you heard because I've heard various things that is a great question um for the very reason that well it's not the only reason but one of the reasons we're not considering emptying any of these is because disposable disposal would be difficult um that's it could be quite of you know if you're tipping out a whole bottle that's quite a volume of hazardous material and you really that needs to be disposed of carefully um and certainly not tip down the drain um we I think you know in in in general these the bottles are sound there's really sturdy glass um it would take a act of extreme negligence or something to really um have a major accident with with one of these or honestly an earthquake um but I feel like in that case we're gonna have a whole slew of problems on our hands but we have not considered draining those one thing that um I think we would we don't have one of these but which we would consider emptying um is a carbon tetrachloride uh fire extinguisher one of those glass grenade extinguishers because carbon tetrachloride is so acutely toxic that I don't think we would want that on hand and I so there are I think it was a museum I want to say in Saskatchewan I have they had a wonderful blog post um a few years back which I had archived somewhere where that's what they did they had one of these and the the weird thing about those is that you don't really know if it's going to be salt water or carbon tetrachloride because the formula was changed and partly because people realized that it was quite nasty and um so you don't really know what's in it and so they left it to drain it and it was a complicated process using a diamond drill bit um and getting inside and draining it and then they had it tested and it was in fact carbon tetrachloride and they had that disposed of very carefully and they felt far better um you know it you don't want one of those breaking in your collection space um so yeah it's it's definitely a very good question and it's sort of it's a hard one to answer it kind of depends you know if you feel comfortable that your storage is is secure and safe um then it might be more trouble than it's worth to drain them if your bottles are already leaking it might be an argument to drain them instead of always dealing with the residue of something nasty so yeah it's that's always been the rule I've always heard is if the bottle is not compromised and looks like it it would you should kind of leave it be market exactly what you said be like hey we got this container of this really bad stuff but in isolate it put it in like the stablest situation you could possibly have it in and then kind of just let it be yeah and then just check on it so like you start noticing leaking it's when it starts it's when it leaking you're starts getting the crud around the seal that's when you have to start going like oh no now we have to figure out what what our next steps are exactly dealing with it so yeah it's kind of it's a whole thing yeah old medicine models are delightful to look at but also terrifying all the same time so um what else do we have now that does lead into a good question which is are there situations when the risk would be just too great and the object should be deaccessioned or removed from the collection I'm just going to pipe up and say that's going to slightly depend on your deaccession policy and what you have written for your institution so keep that in mind everyone or you're going to redo your deaccession policy so it includes this fact if you identify thanks with that but what are your thoughts on just kind of when to get rid of things like exactly um that's absolutely a factor and it is a it's a tricky question you definitely have to weigh um you know just because an object is toxic doesn't automatically mean that the object has lost value for example whether that's cultural value or or however you're looking at the concept of value being toxic toxic itself shouldn't be something that really just like destroys the worth of something however there are cases um where the danger posed by an object really might be too great we haven't run into that yet um actually everything that we have we feel confident that we can store safely some things we have very strict restrictions on we're like we're really nobody but conservation can access this you have to have a really good reason to get in there if a researcher asked for it we would say um I don't I don't know you need to have a really good reason to come see this object because we really don't want to disturb it but we haven't yet come into that situation it really also might come down to just your space um are you able to house something safely um yeah it's deaccession is a tricky one um and it really depends on the institution it really depends on the resources just are you able to keep it safe and keep yourselves safe and at what point is it too hard to keep yourselves safe with this object around um trying to pull an example off the top of my head but I at the moment can't think of one we've found that generally you can you can house most things um safely enough to go about your life and I'll just say again like I you know I go back in my head to that question of again what's your deaccession policy saying just what I said at the top is like does that allow you to do it because that's going to be your first hurdle right it's like are you allowed to get rid of those things for that reason within your policy because you know how it is for you know all of us who work within this field you can't just be like I don't like this thing anymore like you can't know that's not justification to get rid of it so that's just your first step but then you're right it's like also finding a new proper home for it and kind of you know all that kind of jazz so it's good to look into that um more questions are rolling in this is fascinating because again it gives me I always feel like sometimes when I work within collections I'm like we are we have the weirdest things or we have the things that will kill you and then you start finding out like everyone else has things that could kill you or like weird things so it always makes me feel better about it generally um so oh someone was asking about there was a symbol in one of the early slides that looked like a rolling pin with one handle what did that signify does that sound familiar to you at all or you can come back to this one um I think that must have been in the oops oh yes so that is a gas canister so that um is a pressurized object so um what else do we have in here because you talked mostly about hazardous materials that are in storage what about any precautions to take when those materials are on view in the gallery areas such as medicine chests of pharmaceuticals would you remove the harm the hazardous bottles from you so yeah no this is this is super interesting and it it depends on the hazard you're dealing with so medicine bottles they're not so bad really I mean keep them obviously and this goes basically for any any object you're putting on display but you want to keep things out of visitor reach um in solid sturdy like for example you want your display situation to be safe for the object you don't want people to be able to reach it you don't want them to be able to fall um again if you're in a seismic zone you want your display situation to be seismically safe and stable um there are situations where you need to do a little bit more so for example if you are displaying a large amount of um uh lacquered objects that contain mercury sulfide um this this was written up by an institution uh they gasketed all of their cases very carefully so not just plopping of a train over the top they these were properly gasketed to keep that vapor from escaping into the space in which the visitors are working um they then had to think really carefully about when they reopened this these cases for D de-install that space had to be ventilated really carefully um it was a really interesting situation but so for that you definitely have to have a plan also goes for radioactive items you really it's about again about distance and duration of exposure so don't have a lot of radioactive items on display at once don't let people get up really close um if so for example um some geology museums um I think I'm thinking of the natural history museum in New York has a uh in their geology section there is a room for radioactive specimens and you can walk in you're recommended to only be in there for a certain amount of time there's like a sign above the door says you'll please come in enjoy these specimens don't linger um so there are our ways to uh again limit the exposure there um things with pesticides again if you are displaying a lot of items with pesticides again you might want to consider gasketing your your cases especially if these are volatile organic compounds if it's a lot of naphthalene for example um that is just going to vaporize into your air space so um yeah make sure your space has good ventilation that your that your cases are sealed but it is it is very possible to display pretty much pretty much anything yeah I think a lot of it boils down to just labeling and letting people know kind of what's there not not to be snarky but not to include them in like a children's area or children exactly just things like that so this one's a kind of a three-parter so it says what is the methodology for the decision to test the objects at the museum of Vancouver objects that will be exposed objects from a specific collection or a general sampling of all the objects how much of a percentage of the collection has already been tested so just generally speaking and then in the objects record they had seen a method of classification of toxin toxicity and transfer outability who how did the museum define these classification standards so we can take absolutely so we didn't we were not able to test a large amount of our collection I don't really have the percentage down um for XRF basically so I so in Canada you have to be certified to use PXRF I was able to borrow an XRF and test basically I was given there they gave it to me for a week and it was kind of like test as much as you want so we were able to test a far greater range of of objects with the XRF it kind of started broad looking at both objects we were 90 percent sure would be a positive and those that we were just like maybe but let's figure out what we're looking at so we quickly went and double checked some of the taxidermy some of which had already been tested we double checked some of that we went straight to the hats we also were curious if we were going to find heavy metal pesticides on textiles especially the northwest coast textiles which we did not find the basketry um and uh some of the the leather work uh basically we're just like we don't know if this has been treated with heavy metal and we want to know so we went through sections categories that we were most concerned about first and then once we had done that and kind of we're building up a picture then we kind of started broadening and just saying okay well maybe let's explore a little bit and kind of see what we're gonna see what we hit and we did find some really interesting things there we found some arsenic greens that we weren't expecting we also found some greens that were not arsenic greens but had been labeled as such and so we were able to correct those um we also found some uh cosmetics especially from the chinese canadian collection there were some opera uh cosmetics from the early 20th century these came up positive for lead over and over and over and these weren't on our list originally it was just we're kind of going through and saying oh this is interesting maybe let's try one of these this is white powder and it's it's leaded so good thing we we took a peek at that um we also double checked we were able to because we had time we were able to distinguish between the lacquers that were colored with mercury sulfide and the later lacquers that are colored with dye um which was kind of nice then you just know which ones are not mercury at all um so that was useful the we were able to test far fewer items with gcms um but i think we did we really had to cherry pick those so for those we really had to narrow it down to objects that we were either very concerned about or fairly sure would be a positive we just needed to know we just needed to have that positive to move forward so we were looking for organic pesticides on uh again textiles and basketry and leatherwork um we also had narrowed down the ethnopotamical toxins we did find we had narrowed down and basically we're looking at residue or like this this is residue there are some excellent publications out of um the q garden collection uh about toxins on objects of cultural heritage and using their criteria of looking for residues when should you be concerned about there you know there there is something chunky on the end of this this arrow and looking at the the the history where it comes from who whose people does this come from is this something that i actually should be telling so we narrowed it down like that and we were able to test uh for that um but we weren't able to do as many as many tests for gcms um the numbers in our system so the the transferability and the risk so we have a rubric which i didn't go into this talk because it's kind of like a whole another topic that doesn't really fit into the 45 minutes really snugly but we kind of developed a system a bit like that mercury example i showed you where you are ranking you try to rank hazards based on not just the fact that the material itself is hazardous but how likely is that hazard to um how likely are you to be exposed to that hazard so uh for example the two examples i showed there so the the mask with the lead paint that paint is is the paint layer is very sound it's really not compromised lead yes is toxic so that is a four because it's a sort of the one of the higher toxicities but the paint layer is stable um it really isn't posing much of a risk you can really handle this pretty confidently so that transferability number got bumped down to a one and you get like a little yellow tag and it's not too scary that bottle of like white on the other hand that bottle is scary it's loose powder that stopper is not attached um you need to suit up completely to handle that object so again you have the the high toxicity for the lead and you also have high high transferability which is just the term that we landed on for the powder that lead containing powder so that got a red tag um we consider that a high risk object and it's far stricter in terms of how you can interact with it um so that's kind of that's kind of our system um and uh it's been very useful and it has helped us especially when you are dealing with different ranges within the same hazard otherwise everything like i mentioned gets a skull and crossbones and before you know it your collection is kind of unapproachable um but we wanted to avoid that right exactly a non-accessible collection is not useful to anyone for sure um so a couple people have asked questions that deal with kind of like um i guess dealing with their PPE i guess one of them is how do you accomplish your laundering safely um do you have any opinions on reusable washable night nitrile gloves and then also where do you send your lab coats to be cleaned so it's all dealing with after you're done with it where does all this stuff go essentially or how do you clean it so we do just take it to we did some research on this and we were our original thought was maybe we can take it to where for example the hospital or the labs take their coats to be laundered turns out that was not cost effective for us here um it's kind of it's like an internal system for them and it wasn't something that we were allowed to jump in on so we were actually left with the only options for either laundry at home or just take it to a laundromat so we do take them to a laundromat um ultimately if that's the best choice i'm not really sure i think the level of contamination on these coats is probably not super super high um but the sort of in we also figured that the washers in a laundromat are more intense than the washer just in your apartment building might be a might be better both at washing the clothes but also rinsing itself and rinsing the washer for the next next person um so that's what we landed on um whether or not we try to figure out something else in the future i'm not really sure but that's that's where we've landed um we use disposable gloves um we have not looked into reusable gloves it means a good question for sustainability certainly i think with if we're talking about contamination so for example with heavy metals i think we probably would be still looking at disposal i don't think we'd be wanting to wash and reuse um those gloves partly because it's hard to tell if you've washed them thoroughly enough also are you just washing it down the sink um and is your arsenic just going straight down the sink um and the thing with the hazardous hazardous disposal so so we contracted with a company who came to pick it up and there's a difference between heavy metal disposal and for example organic pesticide disposal organic pesticides can be incinerated so if i don't know i was working with something that had a lot of ddt on it those gloves can just be incinerated everything goes away the heavy metals on the other hand you cannot incinerate those and they actually have to be taken out of province um because being a seismic zone we don't have any because it has to go to it just goes to a dump it gets sequestered um and so we have to send it out of province to a dump that is approved for hazardous material disposal and these are especially lined um so it just goes away and sits somewhere um but it doesn't sit in a dump here that can be compromised during an earthquake um so that's our answer to that um we had two questions that deal with more medical stuff which is always going to be a problem one dealt with basically they have doctor's bags old doctor's bags with liquid in it so their kind of question was how how do you start with that like how do you deal with it right and then someone else had a question that said that they have the opposite problem they have the powdered packets right so it's kind of like both both scary things beyond like a full syringe that you might find in a doctor's bag like how would you start by looking those are kind of like attacking those issues to make sure they're stored properly definitely um i think the first place that we start when we have something like that where we kind of have no idea what it is but we don't like it is to rehouse it so for example the little powder packets um it might be a good idea to put that all into a polyethylene bag just so that it itself is sequestered and then it gives you sort of peace of mind and a little bit of time to figure out your next steps um we've also um uh yeah like have sort of restrict places in our shelving where you have items we do have like unknowns like complete unknowns in our medical collection we have bottles that no longer have labels and so it's just mystery powder mystery liquid um and so for those we out of an abundance of caution have given those our highest tag or a red tag just to say we don't and we're very clear in the record keeping say we do not know what the contents of this is but because we don't know and we don't know what the risk is can handle this as though it were super toxic as though it was one of those patent medicines that contains mercury or strychnine or something just in case and that it gives you the buffer of always handling it and interacting with it as though it were dangerous until perhaps in the future you have the ability to have it tested in which case you might get some answers but i think you know the best the best thing to do is just to assume that it is um just to give yourself peace of mind i think that's the best thing you can really do because like and the other thing is like you're not going to be like well i don't know what it is i'm just going to dump it in the trash like that's like you know what i mean like you don't want to do that because for many different reasons you know what i mean or like you've been saying throw stuff down the sink like you you i guess i can basically say ethically you you can't do that right nothing you can do yeah right so your best bet is to just like hold on to it and just mark it as dangerous you know exactly um some people were also asking kind of like how much does it how did you find the people to do the testing that you've had done and like how much roughly i know it's going to change where you live but how much does it cost roughly to get some of these done was it really pricey or was it surprisingly not or kind of what was your experience yeah so unfortunately my answer to this is not going to be super helpful because we it was all free for us so CCI offers this as a service to museums and so you have a certain you have a certain number of samples that you can send in um and and they'll just test them for you if we had and that's also why for example especially for the GCMS we didn't do a lot of samples because we were running on a budget for this project we really didn't have spare money and so we used the opportunity to have those samples run um and then didn't have it in the budget to take it further so I actually don't have a great answer for that also with the XRF because we borrowed it from another museum um and it was just colleagues lending to colleagues again that was just a free loaner situation um I think it would so I don't really know I think it varies um I think it's more I would imagine it's more expensive to go with for example a private company versus perhaps a university department that might have like a handling or loading fee um but I actually am not positive so I apologize for that that's fine I was thinking like years ago when I worked for a museum we had um a stuffed bear named Vlad because we didn't have any other name for him that we were kind of guessing that he might have issues to him we had a couple things it was a Native American museum so we had a couple things that we were thinking oh this might be a deal we might want to look into so we wrote it in as a project and somehow found grant funding to have someone bring down like their XRF gun and like do like we just we pulled out everything that was scary I said just it just for like go for it like you know what I mean and you know at the time I think about it now and I'm like we should have reached out to some of our colleague institutions and just been like hey if you have something that you think could be tested in this way maybe bring it by you know what I mean like kind of do that kind of thing so I I do think it was not cheap this was over 10 years ago so I couldn't even tell you how much it cost but um every once in a while there will be like a funding opportunity or maybe it's just like a big project you can look for funding to help support something like that for happening so that's something to think about as well um let's see what else we have in here like I said it's been kind of fascinating reading these it's just like you you learn about what crazy stuff we have in all of our collections across the world um this one's kind of interesting how have you communicated your knowledge of risks in the collections to your security team to your emergency action plan preparatures and community first responders so the knowledge of this has it worked itself into overarching plans and policies for your institution and kind of who's in the know at your institution of the levels of things that you have within your collection that's a yeah that's a great question so my okay so we we have made a map of storage where we have marked out locations for particularly things that would become a very big problem if if the collection were to burn down um so places where we have high concentrations of heavy metals also where we have our radioactive collections because for example in the event of a fire those heavy metals just accumulate in the soot so it's good to know kind of just mapping to have have an idea of where they are both the first responders know where they are if we're responding to an emergency in the institution like say there has been a fire or a flood and it's been dealt with and now we're in there trying to salvage um the collection that so we know and any volunteers who are helping us can see where things are so that's helpful um my I believe my supervisor had we have spoken with I haven't done this but I believe my supervisor has talked with like the fire basically equivalent of the fire marshal so that they kind of they kind of have an idea of like what the deal is broadly um as for like security I don't think museum security well it's city security but they're not so much um folded into this yet um it'd be nice you know in the future um if we could do that other departments are so for example our fabrication team we we do a training with all of our basically any staff who interact with objects do a hazard training so that includes our preparators our our you know facilities just so that everyone anyone who would either be in storage to work with objects or has to work with objects for example in the preparation of an exhibition all of these people have had have had our little training so they at least know that hazards are a thing and we're also very careful again say if there's exhibition prep if an individual item is toxic or hazardous that they know exactly what they're dealing with um yeah that makes sense um someone also asked if tetanus shots or something you address within your staff do you guys require any kind of shots or personal things or what are your no I'm actually due for a tetanus shot so um yeah I should probably get on that but no we don't not about stay on top of your tetanus boosters yeah no joke I think everyone should stay on top of all shots that they can't they get um because so uh someone uh said in the chat that XRF equipment is becoming more affordable and many universities are acquiring this technology you may be available to help out check chemistry geology or anthropology department so again our friends who work at universities talk with friends yeah that's that's a great I like I said that's something that sometimes you just don't think of and you're like oh wait if I talk to them they'll know so um someone this kind of goes back to kind of an ethical question which is we are weeding out our collection uh the 1970s high-volume unrestricted collecting that was the 70s I would wager we would want to remove several hats and medicine bottles we typically send weeded materials to a local auction house um if not obvious alternate organization to transfer is there an ethical issue of warning about the potential hazard I would say yes yeah yeah just be on the same side um I you know pesticides especially I mean pesticide use in museum collections was widespread um and it's really difficult to know until you've done testing people did not keep great records on this we have we have some planners from some of the previous conservators dating from like the 70s and we have like blocks of time that say fumigation but that's it like we don't know anything more than that it's just like oh something happened um so yeah I I think especially pesticides could be an issue yeah I know that again I started my career in the American collections and it's whenever I walked into a room and it was oh this stuff is all collected turn of the century and it looked beautiful I was always like oh man pesticides like you would just look at it and be like oh it's probably our steak all over that so that's unfortunately a common thing there are still quite a few uh questions so what I think I'm going to do is I'll I'll look at maybe one or two and then we're gonna I'm going to capture them and I'll send them to Hailey and then she can follow up with the folks who posted them yeah exactly um one thing I did want to cover real quick though is I liked how the fact that you were talking about you know kind of the stuff of wiping down things washing your hands doing all these things that have been repeated a lot in the past year when it comes to COVID precautions and stuff I'm hoping that you know it's it's gonna be more common now to just really be aware of the cleanliness of your work stuff but I think that that was just talking about it I was like I think we're all much more used to that yeah like early last year when we were saying don't touch your face don't touch your face it's like yeah no that's awesome don't touch your face um so some people were had a couple questions in regards to specifically asbestos which um as a kid who grew up in the 80s I remember lots of elementary schools getting asbestos abatement seemed like that was the thing when I was moving up um someone specifically says the stove you mentioned in what ways is exposure possible simply from it just sitting there or moving it or when you take it apart or like when are the things that should start pinging in your brain when you're dealing specifically with asbestos I would say definitely if something's being taken apart I would not take something apart if you suspect that it has asbestos so this would be old stoves old electronics um ideally that should be done in a in a very under very strict conditions where you're either you're wearing protective equipment or perhaps you even have like um air being drawn out of your space um asbestos so we're still working on our asbestos question um we have a lot of objects that we suspect of having asbestos and we're hope we're arranging to have a bunch of things tested because it's not it can be tricky it's not always super super obvious there's like a range of ways asbestos can manifest in your collection and there's a lot um I mean friable asbestos is what you're really worried about is asbestos that's crumbling um so if you have say I don't know say you popped open say say that stove and that was already in pieces the way we had it it was it was already just chunks so we were trying very hard not to disturb those chunks and just basically get it onto the plastic get the plastic over it tape that thing up um and then wheel it away um you really really don't want to disturb asbestos so if you have any suspect if you're suspicious at all that something has asbestos in it best first step is to bag it um and uh you can arrange for testing you need to take samples for that and it has to do with this with a percentage of asbestos fibers that they see in the sample um which I'm not super super up on again like I said we're arranging to have that done basically we have sequestered anything that we suspect of having asbestos and we keep running into them we keep running into objects that we haven't really interacted with frequently and then when we do uh for example we're doing a big photography campaign we're trying to digitize the whole collection and we're running into things that we haven't touched in decades and pull up the record and it's suspected of containing asbestos so we're just we're very cautious around it um we always suit up if we have to have to work with these um and yeah it's one of the ones that we're the most sort of leery about mostly because we feel like we don't have a great handle on it yeah yeah and then you read like if you read when asbestos came on the market like they were like this stuff is amazing you know what I mean like it's pretty crazy if you kind of go back to the history of it a little bit because they were putting it like everywhere and I grew up in Pennsylvania in the 80s and it was just like in every school it was like a huge part of I remember the beginning of every school years I'm cutting shutting down a half of a school and just dealing with asbestos abatement and stuff so anyway it's very interesting well we are already past 230 Eastern so I'm gonna have to shut it down which is unfortunate because it's fascinating and there is a question about vaccination scabs and how to deal with handling that I kind of I'm tempted do you have any quick thoughts on that because I was like vaccination scabs I think so I think like you know back in the day like someone kept samples of scabs I mean I we don't have any we don't have any vaccination scabs or anything of that nature but like potential I I think it's there there is a world of research that you could do on biological hazards and like is something like that still viable like is the the virus or whatever in there is that still viable and I think that's a fascinating question there are medical collections who do deal with this so there are people out there again just don't be shy to email institutions and ask them but there are medical collections out there who might have answers for you but that's fascinating this is why I love the cdc care audience there's already two references that people put in the chat it's a healthcare museum in Kingston had those and then someone else said the motor museum in Philly so I was like I love our audience they're like oh yeah these two places probably deal with that that's perfect well I'll just say real quick in the chat I put the survey for cdc care please fill that out that helps with future planning of future cdc care webinars I also put the link directly to the course that we're starting in July so if this kind of wet your whistle when it comes to this entire world of just health and safety and hazardous materials and stuff I would encourage you to take that course I think it's going to be fascinating hopefully Haley will be part of it at the end especially so we're kind of lining up speakers and everything right now so we hope you will join us for that and I want to say a huge thanks to Haley for taking some time today and doing this presentation this was fascinating and thanks to IMLS as we are a grant fund we are partially funded by them to FAIC who's our parent organization for this program and to learning times who act as our technical advisor again we have the course starting in July we have our free webinar in July and we're building out our fall schedule so if you're interested in more webinars go check our website so thanks again Haley and I hope you guys have a great afternoon thanks we'll see you soon