Focus Issue: Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit: A Review of Hazard Identification and Risk Mitigation 2016

Abstract

Understanding the important role that occupational health and safety plays in collections care has become fundamental to the preservation of our cultural and scientific heritage. The knowledge that safe practices lead to safe collections has permeated our field, as has the acknowledgment that safe practices lead to the safety of staff, volunteers, and visitors. Occupational and environmental health and safety professionals, conservators, and other collection care professionals joined forces to organize a 2016 conference in Washington, D.C. to offer a platform for the exchange of technical information. Key topics included assessing risks and controlling hazards in preparing, treating, managing, and exhibiting collections as well as abating structural hazards and responding to disasters.

The Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit became an annual event and continues to be presented by the Washington Conservation Guild, the American Industrial Hygiene Association Potomac Section, and three entities from the Smithsonian Institution (the Lunder Conservation Center, National Collections Program, and Office of Safety, Health, and Environmental Management). Attendance has significantly increased recently, particularly during the global pandemic when the Summit shifted to online only, and as a result, attracted many international registrants and presenters.

This issue of the journal introduces selected papers from these highly successful meetings from the first six years. (Plans for future Summits are underway). This current journal issue also illustrates some of the ongoing issues, newly discovered risks, and creative solutions in addressing life safety while promoting preservation of, and access to, heritage collections, sites, and facilities.

Bringing together the thought leadership and practices from these summits was a daunting task, as the six years of Summits gave voice to over seventy presentations. Many were research or case studies; others were program examples, panel discussions, and descriptions of federal agency and national professional organization outreach to and resources for cultural heritage workers and employers. To undertake the review process, we, as guest editors for this issue working in conjunction with the journal editor, grouped abstracts from the Summits into common themes such as health and safety/conservation collaboration, exhibit safety, mold, emergency preparedness and response, hazard identification, and exposure risk control. The abstracts were reviewed according to several criteria, including current relevance and degree of impact from study findings and control implementations.

After this first phase of peer review, authors were invited to submit an article that would undergo further peer review. We are grateful to the many anonymous reviewers, professionals from both collections care and health and safety, who offered their expertise in reviewing the articles. The articles, as described below, cover a range of topics that provide insight into health and safety practices in the United States. Following the description of each article is the year of the Summit at which the topic was presented initially.

The Comprehensive Occupational and Environmental Risk Assessment of Elemental Mercury at the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, NJ by Bernard L. Fontaine, Jr., reveals a fascinating history of Edison’s many process inventions at his sprawling production plant and research laboratory. The development of dependable, powerful mercuric oxide batteries to power mechanical equipment resulted in the forgotten storage of degrading chemical supplies on wooden shelves. The paper presents an excellent blueprint for the assessment and remediation of widespread elemental mercury contamination at any cultural heritage site. (Summit 2016)

As Emily Hamilton, Jeff Sotek, and Steve Poletski illustrate in Navigating Change and Safety with Mercury in an Installation by Rebecca Horn, addressing safety in modern art often requires a collaborative approach that not only respects the artist’s intent, but the need for careful risk evaluation and development of mitigation strategies that serve the interests of all parties. Their work shows how all relevant options were explored and the consensus that evolved for care and exhibition of an important work. (Summit 2017)

Since the beginning of the profession, conservators have adapted the tools and techniques of other professions in the interventive treatment of art and artifacts. Kerith Koss Schrager, Anne Kingery-Schwartz, and Julie Sobelman’s Not a Known Carcinogen: Health and Safety Considerations of New and Innovative Treatments describes how available chemical safety information tailored to other industries is often insufficient for the innovative and often “off-label” use of chemical products in conservation practice. The authors counsel the reader that the use of the term “not known” on a Safety Data Sheet is a red flag. “Not known” does not mean safe; it could indicate that not enough research has been conducted on this chemical. It could mean that listed national or international occupational exposure levels have not been updated for years. Instead of assuming that the chemical is safe, the authors indicate that user should instead exercise safe work practices, as outlined well in the article. (Summit 2017)

Many museums, particularly those with exhibits for young people, have educational collections that educators may handle or visitors are encouraged to touch and feel. Can’t Touch That: Safety, Preservation, and Collection Management Assessments of an Education Collection describes how a team from the National Museum of Natural History, comprising curators, educators, safety and legal professionals, conservators and collections managers, evaluated collection materials for use in the Q?rius interactive gallery. Kelsey Falquero, Catherine Hawks, Deborah Hull-Walski, Kathryn Makos, and Lisa Palmer developed a risk matrix for determining how visitors should interact with each collection item—whether an object can be safely handled by the visitors, or handled only by trained educators, or needs to be displayed only in a closed case. (Summit 2018)

In Managing Mental Health in Cultural Heritage Emergency Response: Occupational Safety and Operational Resilience, Rebecca Kennedy and Nora Lockshin bring to light an important aspect of safety in heritage emergency response that is far too often overlooked by both planners and responders: the physical and especially the mental wellbeing of those who hold these assets in trust or are attempting to salvage them, while faced with potentially unrecoverable losses. The article reviews the resources that discuss behavioral and physical health related to emergency or disaster recovery, and the urge stewards feel to put the safety of cultural heritage before life safety. It also highlights the guilt many feel and the criticism they sustain from others when loss is inevitable or full recovery is impossible. The authors emphasize the need to integrate an understanding of these issues and offer case studies to illustrate the range of concerns. (Summit 2019)

A book seems like the least likely of collection materials to be hazardous, particularly when an attractive book cover invites us to pick up the book and browse. However, Melissa Tedone and Rosie Grayburn’s Toxic Tomes: Understanding the Use and Risks of Heavy Metals in Nineteenth-Century Bookcloth warns us to be wary of brightly colored nineteenth-century volumes with cloth covers, especially the bright green ones. Tedone and Grayburn encourage precaution in handling such books, because the sources of the pretty colors are often heavy metal pigments including arsenic. (Summit 2019)

Amber Tarnowski notes that safe treatment and long-term storage environs for mold-affected objects requires more than the isolation tents used in disaster recovery. A Safer Work Environment for Stabilization of Moldy Collections describes the construction of, and safety enhancements provided by, negative-pressure storage structures with powered HEPA filtration used in asbestos and lead abatement projects. The excellent development highlights the importance of technical collaboration among collection management, conservators, industrial hygienists, and museum engineers. (Summit 2020)

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) often educes visions of insect infestations, but what do you do when you receive a collection that has been infested by rodents? In Protocols to Prevent Transmission of the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome: Three Case Studies, Jo Anne Martinez-Kilgore provides clear and technically-sound safety guidelines to assess, handle, and treat rodent impact items, storage areas, and sites in order to protect cultural heritage practitioners and facility staff from this life-threatening illness. The risk assessment and protocols are based on current literature and various institutional policies and procedures, and the studies demonstrate practical use. (Summit 2020)

The importance of generating trust among various staffing departments, through collaboration and transparency in communication, was critical to the acceptance of health and safety exposure assessments and response actions following the discovery of contaminated collections in the Harvard Widener Library. John Avedian, Harvard Environmental Health and Safety, and Brenda Bernier, Harvard Library, detail their work in analyzing unidentified residual powder that may have potentially contaminated a large collection. Their shared knowledge of sources and analytical methods to extensively document risks and develop safety protocols to protect both staff and collections are the focus of Powder Struggle: How a Contaminated Rare Book Collection Led to a New Paradigm of Collaboration at Harvard. (Summit 2021)

The purpose of the Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit is to create and disseminate knowledge for anyone with interest in, and/or responsibility for, collections stewardship. We hope that this Focus Issue of the journal will inspire readers to submit their own presentations to future Safety and Cultural Heritage Summits, which will be advertised widely through occupational health and safety, conservation, and other cultural heritage professional organizations. We look forward to a global audience of presenters and attendees at future summits.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Catharine Hawks

Kathryn Makos

Author Biographies

Catharine Hawks is a conservator specializing in natural history collections. While in private practice, she worked with nearly hundred institutions around the world. She is currently museum conservator for the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and a member of the American Industrial Hygiene Cultural Heritage Industry Working Group. She served as senior editor for the publication, Health and Safety for Museum Professionals. Cathy is a Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation, a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation, and a member of the editorial board for Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals.

Tara D. Kennedy is the Head of Preventive Conservation at the Yale Library Center for Preservation and Conservation. She holds a MLIS and a certificate of advanced studies in Library and Archives Conservation from the University of Texas at Austin, an MS in Forensic Science from the University of New Haven, and a bachelor’s degree in Art History from Northwestern University. She is a professional associate with the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and an active member of the AIC National Heritage Responders, a group of conservators that specialize in emergency preparedness and response. She is co-chair of the National Heritage Responders Working Group, and former chair of the AIC Health and Safety Network.

Kathryn Makos, MPH, CIH, Certified Industrial Hygienist, retired (2013) from the Smithsonian Institution where she has been affiliated for over thirty-five years: twenty-six years with its Office of Safety, Health, and Environmental Management; currently as a Research Collaborator at the National Museum of Natural History. Ms. Makos has lectured and published widely on topics of environmental hazards unique to museums and cultural institutions and is a co-editor of Health and Safety for Museum Professionals (2012). She is an American Institute for Conservation Awarded Honorary Member, a former Chair of their Health and Safety Committee, and Past Chair of the AIHA Museum and Cultural Heritage Industry Working Group.

Anne Marigza is a conservator of books and documents at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and a Professional Member of the American Institute for Conservation. She is a past member of the AIC Health and Safety Committee, including serving as co-chair. Anne is a member of the Museum and Cultural Heritage Industry Working Group, a collaborative effort between AIC and the American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) to provide health and safety information to the collections care profession. She has also served on the board of the Washington Conservation Guild in various positions. She is on the planning committee for the annual Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit, a collaborative effort of the Smithsonian Institution, the Washington Conservation Guild, and the AIHA Potomac Section, and has been since its inception in 2016.

Melissa Miller is collections specialist and consultant. She has worked extensively in collections management, preventive conservation, and museum education. Her current work focuses on cultural heritage emergency management, and education and outreach on collections care topics. Melissa has a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from Indiana University—Purdue University of Indianapolis, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art Conservation and Anthropology from the University of Delaware. Melissa is also a member of the editorial board for Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals.

Samantha Snell is the Collections Management Specialist for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collections Program (NCP). In this position, she works to improve Smithsonian-wide collections emergency management and collections management professional development training as well as to support other priority pan-Institutional collections initiatives. Prior to joining NCP in 2016, Sam had a fifteen year career at the Smithsonian’s National Air And Space Museum’s collections department. She earned her BA from Moravian College, Bethlehem PA, and is a member of the AIC Emergency Committee, C2CCare working group, and the Heritage Emergency National Task Force.

Focus Issue: Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit: A Review of Hazard Identification and Risk Mitigation 2016–2021