Triage - Archives sector

Potential cultural sensitivities

Managing teams and space

As with salvage situations, you should allocate distinct and targeted roles to individual team members. Depending on the size of the collection, roles include:

A team leader to oversee the work, provide a central point of contact and direct the focus of activities where priorities may change rapidly.
Someone to liaise externally. If the collection is large or in a highly visible public space, this role will handle enquiries and communicate with people, allowing the team removing or processing items to work uninterrupted.
Someone to manage stores and equipment, to ensure people are well equipped and have all they need.
Retrieval team members to bring items to a triage area, whether this is on site or elsewhere.
Triage team members to assess items, record condition and stability and forward to the intervention team.
Intervention team members to begin conservation processes of basic cleaning, drying and housing.

Where the collection is small, the same individuals might fulfil multiple roles. You may need a larger team with individual roles for larger collections.

Team welfare is very important: incorporate the need for breaks into the triage schedule (see ‘Managing wellbeing‘).

Potential cultural sensitivities

Be mindful of the need for respect and sensitivity in handling and working with individual items, ideally in consultation with people affected. For example, people of specific genders may need to handle certain items, or you may need to avoid using particular types of conservation materials (the ‘Cleaning and repair‘ page of this guidance has more advice on this).

Emergency interventions

You may identify heightened risk factors to a rapid response collection including from:

location, which may heighten the risk of items being destroyed or damaged beyond reasonable salvage
vandalism and theft, particularly where an event may be contested or divisive
adverse weather, which may destroy or significantly damage items

You could create temporary protection by covering a site with polythene sheeting, weighted to prevent it from moving. However, you should consider this a temporary measure as condensation may form below the sheet, itself a risk. You could also use zip lock plastic bags to protect individual vulnerable items such as paper, again as a temporary measure. See the ‘Storage‘ page of this guidance for useful equipment and materials.

Contaminants and pests

Contamination from environmental pollutants and insect and animal pests may be significant risks. These often depend on location: for example, items from sites next to roads may have oily contaminants.

You should assume that all items from an outdoor setting will be affected by surface water and possible animal pest excreta, and are therefore contaminated. Items may also be dirty with soil, staining from organic material such as decaying flowers, mud from human traffic and rain splashes which carry dissolved mud.

Damp-loving pests such as silverfish are the main pest risks. Images show an example of a silverfish and the grazing damage to paper by silverfish. This is likely to occur rapidly when paper is left undisturbed, touching other items, and exposed to damp conditions.

Quarantine

Given the risk of contamination and infestation, you should quarantine a rapid response collection. If you do not have a separate quarantine space you can use clear, lidded boxes, lined with blotting paper. You will be able to see any pest activity or condensation through the clear box, and the seal on the boxes will keep pests contained. See ‘Storage‘ for useful equipment and materials.

Ideally you should dry items before quarantining them – ‘Moving and drying items‘ has more advice on this. If this is not possible, you can use large flat lidded boxes to contain items in a single depth between layers of blotter. Several layers of blotters may be used in one box. You should change the blotters frequently to reduce the risk of condensation and mould. You could include silica gel cassettes or pouches in a box to reduce the humidity and include a data logger to monitor how effectively the silica gel is working and determine when you can remove it. You should also include a sticky blunder insect trap in the box.

For small groups of materials or individual items, you can use a large 2.5-gallon freezer bag with a zip lock as quarantine housing.

You should quarantine items for at least two weeks. Check daily for signs of pest activity both visually and in the sticky trap. Signs include evidence of pest species themselves, frass (insect excreta), signs of pests eating (losses, holes) and dust from boring insects.

If you find insects, freeze items in an industrial freezer or blast freezer to minus 30°C for at least 72 hours. This should kill all insect species. It is important to get the core temperature of the material down to this temperature as quickly as possible. If only a domestic freezer is available, these can reach temperatures of minus 20°C, and you should freeze items in small batches for at least a week. The Canadian Conservation Institute provides useful guidance.