The Conservator

My thesis project has officially begun! I'm working with an old mineralogy- and geology teaching collection at a local university.

So far I have only briefly looked through the collection storage facilities, and that may be a very generous description. Water damage(s), tempterature fluctuations, pests, no shelves, containers precariously positioned on pallets and the like... And so on. I'll be setting up climate monitors some time in the coming week, while I figure out which rooms require what kind of attention, as well as getting an idea of exactly how extensive potential damages are - there's a lot of shelves in this collection, and any of of them may or may not be full of damaged specimens that I have not yet been able to see.

The university wants to eventually move the collection into one location at the moment, but the room they want to move the collection into is one of aforementioned water-damaged rooms. I'll have to see if I can present a convincing argument in the form of "Please Do Not" by the end of this process, which hopefully shouldn't be too much of a problem.

I've got a couple things to do in the coming weeks, mostly consisting of 'setting up climate monitors' and 'emails'. I need to figure out who may have access to the old collection journals. My biggest mystery yet...

Included here: A specimen, not bread.