One of the great challenges in museums is keeping the collection clean once it’s on display – dust & dirt are our number one enemy! This isn’t a new problem either,...
A while back I was given six small samples to analyse – nothing unusual about this till I looked at the images of the object that the samples had come from and immediately...
Though my university training and this internship I have come accustomed to handling museum objects, and for the most part I’m perfectly comfortable doing this – except...
Last July I wrote about our project using a raspberry pi and its camera module to track the decay of a plastic handbag. The project has been running for about 4 months now and...
Let me begin with a little confession – while we like to think of ourselves as immune to them, sometimes we make silly mistakes. This happened most recently when we began the...
As part of my internship I have been repeating and expanding on some of the experiments into cleaning that they did during the POPART project. One part has been repeating...
At the very beginning of my internship I posted (in rather mushy way) about the FTIR machine that we have here in the lab. We have quite a good setup here and over the...
So a while back I posted an image of one of the plastic handbags we have here in the Conservation Science Dept. We use these non-museum objects as sacrificial lambs in the aid of...
So I have been researching about Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) over the past while and I came across this lovely example in the lab of the major danger associated with PVC. Many of us...
We collect a lot of samples during the year and these days we store them in little plastic resealable bags or if they are really small we put them in clear gelatin...
The nice people over that the Getty Conservation Institute have just released their new newsletter for Spring 2014. It deals with all things plastic and has a great article on...
We had to cool the FTIR machine down to do some analysis… I’ve used liquid nitrogen before, but this never gets old!! In a later post ill speak a little on why we use...
So then, Plastics… Why do we need to conserve things that we have been told last for hundreds of years in rubbish dumps? Well it turns out that some plastics don’t last that...
Today I tested some of the different ratios of of Paraffin oil and carbon black, a standard soil, that have been mentioned in literature. Once the ideal one has been chosen I can...
We calibrated the XRF machine this week – how often do you get your hands on these weird metals… (Every now and then I will do a mini post between the regular, larger...
I suppose it’s best to begin at the beginning – My name is Mark Kearney and until a short time ago I was living the idyllic (yet unemployed) country life on the west coast of...
