Museums, archives and historic buildings

The collection is the food source

A general commercial pest program is organized around the pests that bother people: cockroaches, ants, mice, flies. Those matter in a museum too, but they are not the ones that destroy collections. The insects that do are specialists in dry animal and plant protein, cellulose, and starch, which is to say they are specialists in the materials museums keep. The useful way to organize a collections program is by material, not by room.

Read down the right-hand column and very little of it appears on a route technician's target list. A service visit that inspects the loading dock and the staff kitchen, replaces rodent bait, and treats a perimeter can be performed flawlessly and still never look at a textile store, a herbarium cabinet, or a drawer of study skins.

A trap catch is data only if someone can read it

Most institutions already run blunder traps. The traps are not the gap. The gap is what happens to them afterwards. A trap is a monitoring instrument only when three things are true of its catch: it is identified to species, it is trended against earlier catches from the same position, and it is held against a threshold that triggers a defined response.

Species and context change the meaning of the same insect. A varied carpet beetle on a windowsill in May may well have come in from flowering plants outside. One in a textile store in January is more likely to have developed indoors, on something in the room. The trap log that records both as "one beetle" has recorded nothing a collections manager can act on.

Federal repositories carry a written standard

Repositories curating federally owned or administered archeological collections operate under 36 CFR Part 79. Its standards for determining whether a repository can provide adequate long-term curatorial services require that the collection be handled, stored, cleaned, conserved, and exhibited in a manner that protects it from breakage and possible deterioration from a list of agents that includes "insects, rodents and general neglect."

Two things follow. Pest protection is part of the standard the repository is measured against, not a building-maintenance line item. And the standard names general neglect in the same breath, and a monitoring program that is set up and then never read is hard to tell apart from it.

Every treatment becomes part of the object's record

Under the regulations implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the itemized list a museum or federal agency compiles for human remains and associated funerary objects includes "the presence of any potentially hazardous substances used to treat any of the human remains or associated funerary objects, if known."

A treatment applied to a collection does not stay in the service log. It travels with the object into consultation and repatriation. A documented, non-chemical program of monitoring, isolation, freezing, and anoxia keeps that record clean going forward, and a written history of past treatments, assembled from whatever records survive, is part of good stewardship of the collections that already carry one.

The building is part of the collection

In a historic house museum, a courthouse, a capitol, or a railroad depot, the structure is itself the artifact. Original framing, floors, and millwork are collection material in every sense that matters, and they are subject to termites and powderpost beetles like any other wood.

Assessment of that wood belongs in the same program as the collection monitoring, as does bird, bat, and rodent exclusion designed so that it does not damage historic materials. An exclusion job specified for a modern commercial building can do more harm to a historic fabric than the animals it keeps out.

How the work gets done

The practice writes the program, reads the traps, reviews the service records against the program, and trains the staff who carry it day to day. The recommendations are written to stand on their own, so any licensed pest management provider can carry them out, including one the institution already uses.