Biodiversity Information Science and Standards : Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Danielle Measday (dmeasday@museum.vic.gov.au)
Received: 29 May 2018 | Published: 13 Jun 2018
© 2018 Danielle Measday , Rosemary Goodall
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Measday D, Goodall R (2018) Measuring and Mitigating Mercury Gases in the Museums Victoria Collection. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2: e27044. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.2.27044
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For the past six years the conservation and collection management departments at Museums Victoria have been conducting a major survey to determine the type and extent of hazardous substances in the collections to better inform safe handling and storage practices. This paper focuses on mercury compounds in the collection, including mercury chloride applied as a pesticide, mercury sulfide pigments, liquid mercury used in scientific equipment, and mineral specimens such as native mercury and cinnabar. All these compounds can release volatile mercury vapour into storage furniture and have the potential to contaminate both the cabinet and other specimens stored nearby.
Although previous testing had confirmed that the air in storage rooms and workspaces contained no detectable levels of mercury vapour, recent publications by
Air from cabinets was sampled across the indigenous cultures, history, technology and natural sciences collections. Results showed levels of mercury vapour could be considerably above 25 μg/m3 the Australian time-weighted average (TWA) exposure standard for an 8 hour workday in cabinets of bird skins and indigenous artefacts treated with mercuric chloride pesticides. Results above 150 μg/m3 the temporary emergency exposure level (TEEL) were measured in the mineralogy collection. Mitigation strategies are being implemented to reduce the risks to staff health and contamination of other collection materials, including enclosing mercury-containing species of minerals in gas barrier film, venting high risk cabinets to dissipate vapour before accessing specimens, and engineering controls during the handling of specimens.
Conservation, hazardous substances, storage, natural science collections, mineralogy, vapour
Danielle Measday