30 May
2013
30 May
'13
11:49 a.m.
On May 30, 2013, at 1:05 PM, Dave Caroline <dave.thearchivist at gmail.com> wrote:
I currently have 26 Ikea Flarke shelf units holding
books, databooks
and manuals
which I think are no longer available and they are chipboard so have
"some" wood in them.
They do bend a bit, but why worry about what they are made of it is
the contents that matter.
I found the Fl?rke to be a pretty decent bookshelf in college, not
least because they cost as little as $15 each for a decent amount
of capacity when they were on sale. Alas, they seem to have
discontinued them.
It should be pointed out that while they stood up to just about any
amount of books I wanted to put on them, they did not withstand
moves very well. They tended to prefer a non-right parallelogram
shape, and of course once chipboard does that there's really no
going back.
I see the archive purists screaming about use of
plastics (out
gassing) etc, but in the case of records
and sleeves you have a large percentage of plastics in the make up of the item.
I see plastic coatings in use in a lot of items, we just have to get
used to the degradation over time until someone finds a real cure or
method of stabilizing random unknown plastics.
I have rather little problem with plastics in my bookshelves.
Plastics in a lining for my raised vegetable bed is another matter,
since a) we will be eating what comes out of it and b) the plastic
in a raised bed gets warm enough that I would be genuinely concerned
about the leaching of various estrogen analogs into my food.
- Dave