Dangers can be found in library and museum collections at any time. Fortunately, Preservation Services staff partner with the University’s Environmental Health & Safety (EH&S) department to identify dangers and protect the safety of staff and patrons.
The sixth annual Safety and Cultural Heritage Summit: Preserving Our Heritage and Protecting Our Health will take place virtually on Tuesday and Wednesday, October 19-20, 2021. The event is hosted by the Washington Conservation Guild, the Potomac Section of the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the Smithsonian Institution's Office of Safety, Health and Environmental Management, and the Smithsonian National Collections Program. Registration to the conference is free of charge and open through October 16th.
The event features topics focusing on controlling health and safety risks from preparing, treating, managing, and exhibiting artistic, historic, and natural science collections as well as abating structural hazards and responding to disasters impacting collections, including challenges of the pandemic.
John Avedian, CSP, Harvard's EH&S Senior Safety Officer and co-presenter Brenda Bernier, Malloy-Rabinowitz Preservation Librarian and Director of Harvard Library Preservation Services will be presenting Powder Struggle: How a contaminated rare book collection led to a new paradigm of collaboration at Harvard.
In 2015, staff in Harvard University’s Widener Library discovered an unidentified white powder in a few early 20th-century books in Persian and Urdu languages that had been acquired four years previously from a rare book dealer in Pakistan. Working with the Library’s Preservation Services and Harvard Environmental Health and Safety, testing positively identified the powder as the insecticides Dichlorodiphenyltricholroethane (DDT), Coumaphos (which are legal and fairly common in several Middle Eastern countries) and several derivatives. While testing was underway, it became evident that these volumes were part of large collection and that potentially thousands of volumes were contaminated.
The scale of the contamination prompted careful but immediate action. A transparent communication campaign was initiated to inform staff who were in proximity to the collection. The catalog records were suppressed so patrons could not request the volumes. Industrial Hygienists conducted air monitoring. Standard Operating Procedures for handling, triage, and deaccessioning were developed. The curator prioritized and culled the books based on intellectual value and rarity of content. Facilities staff quarantined the collection, cleaned the space, and arranged for a safe off-site location for a contractor to vacuum the loose debris from the affected volumes. Another bioassay confirmed the cleaned books were still insecticidal so they were packed up and put in storage. Further work is still to be done in order to make the rare content of these books available to patrons.
The discovery helped create a new culture of collaboration and communication between Safety, Facilities, and Preservation personnel. The experience also led Library administration to charge a task group to design a workflow in dealing with contaminated collections and to make actionable recommendations for the library leadership. Safety and Preservation personnel developed a comprehensive Library Safety training module on emergency response, mold and pests, as well as how to deal with unknown substance discoveries. The transparency of communication and demonstrated collaboration between Safety, Facilities, and Preservation personnel generated trust among library staff that their health and safety were paramount. This trust was key to subsequent incidents of contaminated collections and our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For more information, contact John Avedian.
