26 Sep
2014
26 Sep
'14
12:49 p.m.
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.
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.
I am wondering why you want to cvause an outbreak of food poisoning here :-)
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.
I am not sure they _did_ know that :-(Certainly the descriptions o nthe
exhibits do not demonstate much techncial knowledge.
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.
FWIW, I feel the 'swiss army knife' and 'Leatherman' type tools are very
sueful in an emergency. But the screwdriver pladeas are no way a complete
range of sizesm and they are not as comfortable to use and a normal
screwdervier (read : if you don't feel comforatable holdign the tool you
are more likely to let it slip out of the screw slot).
i would expect somebody working in a museum to have the right size
screwdriver for such work (specially ground if necessary).
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!)
I have no idea id the square key tool is easy to get, I do know that any
machinist could make one in a few minutes on a millign machine. And
that's what I would do. This si not exactly complicated...
Said musuem, apparently, once had an excellent mechcnail workshop for
making demonstation models nad repairing exhibits. I ahve no diea if it
sill exists, my guess is that it doesn't.
-tony