25 Sep
2014
25 Sep
'14
12:45 p.m.
On Sep 25, 2014, at 2:53 PM, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
That tells me they are not in fact conserving it as if they were pieces of fine art.
Instead, what you describe is an establishment that is, plain and simple, incompetent ?
unfit to pretend to be a museum at all. Or at least, they hire people who are utterly
unqualified for the job and who should make fish & chips instead.
Job #1 of conservatorship is to understand what is required to conserve the thing you?re
told to conserve. If you don?t know that conserving electronic devices requires ESD
safety practices, you?re too stupid to work there, it?s that simple.
...
What is worse to me is that many museums seem to regard all exhibits as
being pieces of fine art and conserve them accordingly. One 'horror
picture' I saw (relating to a major London musuem) showed some of the
workers handling parts of a prototype electornic device wearing
disposable rubber gloves. Yes, fingerprint oils and sweat do damage
objects. But ESD is a much worse problem for MOS ICs (which I happen to
knwo this deviec was full of). And yet they did nothign about that (no
wrist straps, etc0. In fact the gloves probably made it worse.
Mind you, I was in siad museum a few weeks ago. I happeneed to see one of
the memebers of staf refittign the covers on a one-of-a-kind device afte
cleaning them. The convers were fixed with slot-head screws and some
quater-turn catches. The former h fitted with a swiss army knife, the
screwdriver blade of which was not the rifght size and was burring the
heads. The latter should have been locked with a square-section key (I do
not know if straight or tapered). Instead he jammed a blade of the swiss
army knife diagonally across the sqare hole and used that to turn it.
The same point I made above applies here, only more so. This is no different from someone
?restoring? a painting with a paint roller. (That apparently did happen, at a major
museum in Holland, 20 or so years ago. Big scandal. The museum claimed to have done
nothing wrong.) Again, if someone thinks ?conserving? something means damaging it by the
use of wrong tools, that person doesn?t have enough functioning brain cells to sweep the
floors in that place.
Especially when the tools in question are readily available for very small sums of money ?
it?s not as if you had to get them custom made. (And of course, if you work on museum
pieces, you DO have to be prepared to get tools custom made if necessary!)
paul