Hi, everyone. We are going to give it just a few minutes so things can get started. You are here today for a C2C Care webinar, which is Care of Tin Mercury Amalgam Mirrors. We will be online for about an hour, so we're going to start in just a few minutes and we'll be on until about 2 p.m. Eastern, just a heads up, hoping everyone, everyone is being prompted as usual, which is always appreciated by this audience. So with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and start with my presentation, which should only take a few minutes. Great. All right, so let me start with saying welcome again to this C2C Care webinar. My name is Robin Bauer-Kilgo. I am the C2C Care Coordinator and that is an email you can reach me at if you have any questions or comments about the program. I'm located just outside of Washington, D.C. in Silver Spring, Maryland, where it is hot, not surprisingly. I think a lot of us are dealing with that right now, so feel free in the chat to say where you're from and where you're located with. You do not need to include temperature if you do not want to, if you don't want to think about it right now. Just really quickly, this is our home on the web. If you are new to us, connect to collections.org. On that website, you will find all sorts of fun information, including a full archive of our programs, also links to some webinars upcoming, some courses upcoming, which I'll get to in just a few minutes, also links to our community, which is a great online resource for people to log into and ask questions from a fabulous group of volunteer monitors and experts who help kind of answer direct care questions when it comes to collections, and also a link to our curated resources. So if you have not been to our website, I encourage you to go there. We have two homes on social media as of right now. We are on Facebook and Twitter. So if you have any interest in finding out about upcoming programming notes or anything else, I encourage you to follow us there. Both of the call signs are at C2Ccare. And a couple of just super quick technical notes. I think we all are all very familiar with Zoom at this point, but I always like to remind people that the chat is for chat. So you have access to that chat box. It looks like you guys are doing wonderful in the chat box as one as usual. The chat box is there for comments and just quick connections with people. If you happen to have a question though for our presenter at any point during the webinar, I encourage you to use the Q&A box. That's another piece of functionality we have. Q&A box is really nice because it will hold the question there until we're ready to answer it. You can put questions in the chat, but sometimes we'll get lost in that stream of consciousness that is the chat. So I would encourage you to go ahead and put your question in the Q&A box at any point. We've also enabled captioning for this program, so if you click on the caption button or the CC button at the bottom, the captioning should come up. So I encourage you to do that as well. We are also recording today's program, so you can expect it to be on our website within just a couple of days. I'll try to post it up there, so just heads up on that as well. Just a couple of quick notes on upcoming webinars. We're trying to get our late summer early fall schedule finalized now because it's going to be a busy time for everyone. So just really quick right now, you can register for three upcoming free webinars. We have in August how to manage volunteers and collections happening from one to two. We're going to really have a collections focus on this one, so we encourage you to go over and register for that. Then in September, we have two webinars scheduled. It's going to be all about arsenic that month, which is going to be fun, I think. We have one that's truly called Arsenic and Collections happening on September 6, 2023. That should be really interesting because we're going to talk about just where you can find arsenic in our collections, PPE, health and safety, all that kind of fun stuff. And then at the end of September, we'll be doing one with the folks who did the poison book projects, which is all you need to know about heavy metals and historical book findings. So September is going to be a fun, deadly month for you to join us for this free webinar series, so I encourage you to register for that. We've also just announced that we're going to be doing a course late August going into September called Writing a Long Range Preservation Plan. Now our courses are a little different than our free webinars. We do charge for our courses, but they are a six series of webinar programs. And what we're hoping is at the end of this program, you will actually walk away with this thing called a Long Range Preservation Plan, which is many of us who have gone through grant cycles or collections planning or anything like that. Folks will often recommend these plans to have within your kind of cadre of policies and procedures and manuals in your museum. So if you're interested in this, finding out what a Long Range Preservation Plan is. If you want to register for the course, I encourage you to go to our website and click on the courses button. There is an early bird registration rate up through August 9th. So if you want to get into it for a slightly lower rate, please go to our website. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speaker today. Her name is Marie DeRocher. She's Preventative Conservator and Preservation Outreach Coordinator at Utah Divisions of Arts and Museums. We're really excited to have her today because we're going to find out about these tin mirrors, which I think a lot of people have within their collections. Maybe you've noticed it before. And I think today you get a chance to find out what they are, how to handle them, and all sorts of fun stuff. So I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to Marie. Feel free to take over when you're ready. And then we will see you during the Q&A portion. Talk to you all soon. Thank you, Robin. Let me show you a screen. Okay. Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in today. As Robin said, my name is Marie DeRocher, and I am a Preventive Conservator, and I work at the Utah Division of Arts and Museums in Salt Lake City. Before I get started, I'd just like to share a little land acknowledgement, and I would like to say it's our honor and responsibility to acknowledge to all who meet with us today, all of you, that we work on land that is sacred to all Indigenous people who came before us in this vast crossroad for the Utes, Goshutes, Paiutes, Shoshone, Navajo, and Hopi peoples and their ancestors. It's been their stewardship for time and memorial to care for this land and all of its inhabitants, both two and four-legged, winged and waterbound. We honor their memory, their physical presence in the state of Utah today, their ancestors' presence here in spirit, and we do so in our reverence for their resilience in preserving their connections to the Creator. We honor the people and we honor the land. Thank you. So a little overview today of what we're going to cover in about the next 40 minutes. First, we're going to talk about how 10 mercury amalgamures were made and basically what they are, and then we're going to talk about health risks and roots of exposure for mercury, really get into the concerns that mercury presents. Then we're going to talk a little bit about testing and identification for mercury, and then finally we're going to get into some practical applications for safe handling, cleaning, and care protocols for 10 mercury amalgam objects in your collection. So first, what even is 10 mercury amalgam and what are these mirrors that we're talking about? So essentially 10 mercury amalgam mirrors this method of creating a 10 mercury amalgam, which is basically where mercury and 10 so two different kinds of metals bind together. It was the primary method for creating mirrors or looking glasses and any kind of object that features a mirror or looking glass between about the 16th century through up until about 1900 or even a little bit maybe first half of the 20th century. And the way that these were created is essentially a thin sheet of tin or like a very thin tin foil was laid down and then an excess of liquid mercury. So mercury is liquid at room temperature. It was sort of poured onto the surface and excess and the two metals would bind together and then a sheet of glass was placed over top so you kind of have this sandwich of glass pressed into the tin and the mercury and they would sort of stick together and then this whole package would be framed like in the image on the left showing an example of that mirrored surface which has aged considerably and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on. So here's an image for example. This is from Diderot's Encyclopedia and he has this is just one of many images that illustrate this process of creating a 10 mercury mirror. And you can imagine that this work was very toxic and very harmful as there was quite an excess of liquid mercury being used in this process and a lot of it would be sloshed off and there would be liquid mercury on the floor and just everywhere really. And even at this time people knew that it was toxic but you know it was still the primary method for creating mirrored surfaces. The image on the left is from a blog actually that I was looking at where man is actually going through the process of recreating a 10 mercury amalgam and you can see the little beads of mercury around the edges. It's sort of an imperfect process and it creates actually while it creates a really nice finished mirrored surface it's actually a really unstable object and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. But so that's kind of what that process would look like of this mercury kind of coming off the sides. You might also be familiar with another type of mercury alloy we do find it for example in like teeth filling and that's where not anymore we don't use mercury of course but historically mercury was used as an amalgam filling in teeth and actually a lot of our understanding about mercury's toxicity and threshold levels for human health and consumption comes from research that was done with dental amalgams. So these are some examples of what could be 10 mercury amalgam mirrors. Looking at them visually you can see that these are not perfect mirrored surfaces anymore and that's because over time as I said before these are really unstable objects as the tin actually corrodes just in ambient temperatures and so let's say that it's been about 200 years you're going to see a lot of this sort of darkening of the surface. A way to identify visually 10 mercury amalgam mirrors is looking for sort of a cooler tone for example another method for creating mirrors was silvery and silver tarnish though has sort of a yellow tint to it and so when you're looking at mirrors and trying to determine do I have a 10 mercury example you're going to look for that kind of cooler tone. That said having worked at Colonial Williamsburg and at the Winterthur Museum Garden and Library a lot of there are also quite a range of sort of historic reproductions of mirrors where they've kind of created an imitation of that surface and whether to mirror so sometimes it can be kind of hard to tell for sure just from looking whether or not what you have is in fact a mercury example or not. Just a couple other things I'd like to highlight so the image on the left and right both of these are showing the 10 mercury amalgam deterioration and again it can be challenging to visually identify these because even though I said it's a cool cast you can see there's still some warmer tones you can kind of see these star patterns anywhere where you're going to see sort of glittery areas and the reflective surface has been disturbed that's going to be a hint that what you're seeing is a 10 mercury deterioration. Also we'd like to point out that we tend to focus a lot on large mirrors and looking glasses but we find 10 mercury amalgam in all kinds of objects with reflective surfaces so for example the image in the middle is not 10 mercury but it's an example it's a reproduction of the kind of maybe wall sconce or light fixtures in which a little 10 mercury mirror would be placed behind a candle you also see these in carriage lanterns so anywhere where a reflective material was needed for light you may be finding 10 mercury amalgam there. So let's talk a little bit about the health risks of mercury and I think I should highlight that again these objects are very unstable and so we find that when you see that corrosion happening sometimes mercury which is liquid at room temperature will actually escape from the object and then come into contact with people who are doing collections care work or who are looking at things on exhibition and you know why are we talking about this why is this a concern well it's because mercury poses significant health risk it is a bio accumulator so that means that it accumulates in our environment maybe familiar with certain types of seafood being a concern as mercury accumulates in for example the ocean environment and then by eating that we are ingesting so just a little sort of health and safety primer a root of exposure is basically where you're being exposed to a toxin so it could be inhalation ingestion absorption or injection in the case of mercury we're most concerned about absorption so contact with skin but also inhalation and potentially ingestion if there was any kind of cross contamination so again the degree though or extent of exposure is determined by measuring the amount of the hazardous substance at the point of contact but also tests can be done to measure how much mercury is absorbed into your blood so they can also do urine tests to determine how much exposure you received and why is this a big deal well because mercury is a neurotoxin and it can influence all of the different organ systems that you see on the right here from the skin the lungs heart liver kidneys digestive system and it's people different people are going to have different thresholds and different degrees of risk around this and response to exposure and I would like to highlight that not only do we find mercury in sort of these mirrors and reflective surfaces that are the primary focus of this presentation I would just like to touch on the fact that mercury is a concern in other collections items from mercury can I treat was used in felt hat manufacture so felt sport even first in collections could have mercury contamination and you may be familiar obviously with thermometers but other kinds of scientific monitoring devices could have mercury in them as well and usually unlike the mirrors in these particular cases they're usually encapsulated and so as long as the glass doesn't break you're going to be all right or not readily exposed to the mercury however having good plans in place about what to do if something like this broke is very important and then also I see these a lot in the collections that we steward in Utah there's a lot of old pharmaceuticals that get collected bottles of historic medicines and things that we wouldn't use anymore and some of them are mercury containing as well so these are just a few other things to keep in mind as we continue to talk about the risk that mercury poses and so some of these concerns we already talked a little bit about the eating fish this is just a general world health organization highlight about mercury and the risk that it poses it's also worth noting that the highest risk are children and pregnant women or fetuses or older people are going to have the highest risk and is used in other industries as well today so you know some of the information for example when I was doing research into it we find out about the health implications of mercury from for example like the small scale mining industry and I'll talk a little bit more about how some technology from that industry has actually been borrowed but this image on the right here you know is showing an example of a mirror at the Winterter Museum Garden and Library and it's perfectly captured this moment where mercury liquid mercury is actually dripping out of the object so we talked about you know the different deterioration but this is where the danger is really being encountered of liquid mercury escaping from the object and dripping into the surrounding environment so I would also like to just acknowledge you know when we're talking about this I think that they're historically has sort of been in a culture of well it's fine you know I grew up playing with liquid mercury and I'm fine you know or we've always done something a certain way and everybody's fine so we don't really need to worry about these objects or possible contamination from mercury dripping out of them but I think it's really important to acknowledge that every individual's risk when it comes to toxins in the environment everyone's risk is actually unique and it's not necessarily something that's easy to measure and so just to build on that a little bit more we know that mercury is a hazard but while they may present sort of universal risks that we understand in a scientific setting the impact it has on an individual depends on the factors and this acknowledges that some people may be playing with liquid mercury without loves as a child and are fine but other people would not be fine in the same scenario so it's also important to note that there's sort of an element of privacy here for workers or I mean just anybody really right we can't know all of the factors that influence a person's experience of a different hazard like this graphic on the right you know saying like well you don't look disabled you don't look like someone who has a pre-existing condition like it's impossible to know what somebody might have going on health-wise and so you know depending on health both visible and invisible disabilities people may experience higher risks than others when exposed to certain hazards and I think just sort of acknowledging all of this this is why it's really important to be aware and cautious of collections hazards and also to have really good policies and procedures in place that ensure that all of your staff are going to be properly protected. I personally really have sort of a low tolerance for risk when it comes to workers health and safety so I will acknowledge that that's sort of my bias but I think at the end of the day just to protect everyone and catch everyone it's important to sort of use an abundance of caution in this area. So I also should say that this presentation and everything that I'm talking about isn't really new information and this certainly isn't you know I'm not the leading expert in this particular area there's a lot of work that's been done and conversations and good documentation had about these particular objects the mercury mildew mirrors and the health and and trying to measure sort of the health and safety concerns that they pose within collections and a lot of this work has been done through the American Institute for Conservation and so this particular quote highlights not particularly about mercury but just about hazards in general and this idea that unlike industrial workers who are likely to encounter higher doses of potentially hazardous materials resulting in an acute exposure museum workers are more likely to be exposed to low level doses of heavy metals or other toxins in mercury for example over an extended period of time resulting in chronic health problems. So an acute exposure is a short contact with a chemical and you may see acute symptoms so acute symptoms of mercury exposure could be like short term memory loss irritation of the eyes sore throat difficulty breathing you might have nausea vomiting headache things like that and so the examples they use here and you know are talking about cleaning windows with ammonia or nail polish remover we could say maybe short mercury cleanup or just being exposed to drips from collection objects that are deteriorating but a chronic exposure like that quote from AIC highlighted is going to happen from continuous or repeated contact with a toxic substance over a long period of time months or years and so this is where you know it can be more difficult to measure exactly how much a person is exposed to because it is sort of little by little over a long period of time. I think I tend to worry about this more in institutions where maybe they have one designated person who always deals with mercury cleanup and I would actually suggest you know in those particular cases kind of sharing that load and so it's not just like one person who's potentially being exposed to that hazard again and again even though I also acknowledge this is not always possible especially in institutions where there may be one staff member kind of doing everything but shifting gears a little bit thinking about methods for mercury testing right off the bat I think it's important to know do we have these types of objects and these are a couple images I took while I was doing a survey of looking glasses at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and I was visually trying to determine if they were or were not to mercury amalgam whether they were a reproduction glass in a historic frame and I hate to say that in this presentation I don't want you to be disappointed but unfortunately we're not going to leave as experts in identifying 10 mercury amalgam I did share those images before and those are very helpful and some of them if you see a mirror that's in very good condition that's a pretty good sign that it's probably not 10 mercury amalgam that said it can be very hard to tell and so this is where understanding the provenance of your objects really comes into play and that's not always possible again knowing where it came from how old it is when it was made that sort of thing and that is why an abundance of cotton in this kind of spirit of an abundance of caution and during the survey if I was unable to determine whether or not it was 10 mercury I sort of aired on the side of caution of you know it could be and I treated it as such just because we want to avoid any unnecessary exposure and but again I think the first step to being safe when working with these types of objects is just understanding what you have what they're present and what first of all what you have in your collection but also understanding their condition and their context right so this is an example of just a really simple google form that I used to complete this survey and highlighting things like you know where it was and what its condition was but also being able to flag things saying okay this is a really unstable condition and I think that this might be dripping mercury in this space so I want to highlight this as a potential contaminant concern and as you can see I also have you know these other boxes where it's like this presents a hazard for other objects that are nearby this presents a potential hazard for staff and that this presents potential hazard for visitors so those are all things that we want to think about and when exhibiting these unstable objects and now the next couple methods I'm going to talk about are based on research that has allowed us to draw conclusions about what is safe and what is best for collections care of these objects but I also would like to acknowledge that most of us are not going to have access to these testing methods or even the time and resources to be able to do this kind of work so I think it's just really good to acknowledge that but also take these studies and learn from them and pull what we can so for example and what you see on the left is a colleague of mine from graduate school at the Winniter Museum Garden and Library in Winniter and excuse me Wilmington Delaware I'd like to acknowledge that this particular museum has many 10 mercury mild mirrors in its collection and because it's also a graduate school or hosts a graduate program with the University of Delaware a lot of research has come out of this institution on 10 mercury mild mirrors so for example there's a study that I believe you can access on the AIC website I can also share it in my resources but a study in which they used an XRF X-ray fluorescence elemental analysis tool to be able to survey mirrors and determine whether or not they were 10 10 mercury I would also just like to acknowledge that even that method was challenging for figuring out definitively whether or not the mirrors were 10 mercury amalgam and again this gets back to my point of kind of like if you're not sure it's okay to just assume and treat it as if it's 10 mercury amalgam just to be on the safe side but in this image on the right my colleague Melissa who was one of the graduates you know sort of line of graduate students who did work with these objects she's actually using a type of sensor that is used in the mining industry that changes color when mercury vapor is released into the air and so just another thing to acknowledge that we talked about liquid mercury at room temperature but also liquid mercury readily evaporates at room temperature as well and so that's where that inhalation concern comes in and that's actually the number one way that people are exposed to mercury which is tough right because you can't see a vapor like that and so this was a method that you know isn't market ready for example like use in our collections but it was a way for them to test and compare different ways of storing these mirrors and we can talk a little bit more about this but then the image on the right is showing a an industrial hygienist we work with and he's using Jerome which is just the brand of sort of digital mercury vapor monitor and that little probe you can see there actually measures in real time the concentration of mercury vapor in the air and I'm happy to say that both of these studies for the most part revealed that we didn't have excessive buildup of mercury vapor to unsafe levels in these storage spaces but we'll get into that in just a minute in the next section and but just to show again that like this is one way that we measure the risk of mercury that's being that escapes from these objects into our collection spaces so there's another image of the pretty straightforward Jerome hand-held monitor another method that I would like to highlight and I think that this is a much more accessible and cost effective option but again and I we can talk about the study and our findings and the conclusions that we drew from that so that not everybody has to do this but essentially this was when I was working at the colonial Williamsburg foundation and similar to monitor we had a very large number of these objects in the collection still have they still have them in the collection both on view in the historic area but also in collection storage and again colonial Williamsburg has been doing a lot of work with these mirrors and monitoring them for many years and actually later on a reference of publication that came out of colonial Williamsburg especially their furniture department does a lot of work to take care of these mirrors but the question was you know we had a many of these mirrors stored in the same area and the question was are we seeing a build up of vapor in this space and and the so the the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health NIOSH as well as OSHA have levels that are considered safe and you can actually see them on this method here but so it's it's an exposure concentration over like a working eight hour period and so this image here that I've shared is from a NIOSH approved method for analytically analyzing or analytically determining the specific concentration of mercury vapor in a space and for this project I worked with a laboratory that we contracted and it was actually very affordable they mailed me these pumps here that are actually little air pumps and what they do they're designed to be worn by a person in a work environment but because we were concerned about just like an ambient space we actually clipped these little tubes to the pumps and then place the pumps right by these objects in a space and then essentially you let them run for eight hours and so it just continually pumps air and these little tubes capture the mercury vapor and when you're done you put a cap on them I mailed them back to the lab and then they analyzed them and sent us the results and we were happy to find that we were very well below the health and safety thresholds that NIOSH and OSHA that NIOSH and OSHA advertise as well as we recognize that a lot of this is probably due to the fact that these mirrors were not dripping large amounts of mercury which is great and also it was they were all being stored in a very stable environment we can talk a little bit more about that in a minute and beyond that they also weren't being moved around a lot and there was a lot of airflow and so we talk about you know it it's it still holds in really every context but dilution is the solution to dilution so even just having an area with a high amount of air exchange and airflow keeps that vapor moving so that it's not building up in a space and getting to a harmful level so it was great great news um but shifting now into sort of some practical takeaways about safe handling cleaning and care protocols for these these objects so I would just like to highlight in terms of display these are some examples of 10 mercury amalgam mirrors that are on display in a couple different contexts at cloning Williamsburg and it's just worth considering that anytime something becomes contaminated with liquid mercury it's it's basically impossible to remove the mercury from that material so we had situations for example at other museums where murphy had dripped out of the mirrors and then it was dripping into an old wood floor and there were cracks in the floor and basically just becoming like embedded in those cracks and so you know then we had questions about well if these continue to evaporate is that hazardous to health and there are other examples of non-mercury mirrors um where non-mercury I'm sorry non-mercury mirrors but residential situations where there had been like a thermometer that broke and the vapors were evaporating like for years on after and causing unsafe exposure but in this particular context it's worth considering the containment of the mercury drips and just making sure that the things you can see there's a lot of objects placed around these objects around these mirrors and if they were readily dripping mercury it would be a concern about the contamination of these objects however these were in stable enough condition that that you know is something worth watching but because they were not visibly actively dripping at this time we could assume that this was an okay way to display them but it's just worth thinking about the context of the space and objects that are around these especially if you're seeing dripping or any kind of unstable activity um now in other cases where mirrors were actively dripping um they would probably be taken off view just because of the risks that those pose um I also forgot to mention in the last slide that a typical a common method and I will link to literature that goes into more detail about this but um typically because you've got the frame and the glass sort of sandwich package trying to keep that mercury in and it might be a little bit faulty and have cracks or openings in the back and a common intervention is just the application of like um mylar or I've heard of other examples using like a really tightly woven fabric but I think that probably the mylar is a better option or even a rigid backing maybe like a poroplast being applied to the back of the frame just to sort of seal in using like a double snarkival like double sided tape um to seal the back and so that would be a great option for example for like these guys that are on display because we know that vapor and liquid mercury can drip out of the back commonly does um but in the case of these other mirrors that are really actively dripping and are deemed unstable they've been brought into collection storage and um this technique that you see here is what is typically called like half bagging and the idea is that instead of completely bagging the entire mirror and trying to like seal it up um remember the dilution is a solution of pollution actually having a half bag so that it's open allowing vapor to escape prevents what we've seen in other studies and examples where it prevents build up of vapor in a sealed space that actually creates a bigger hazard because if somebody down the line was to open that then they could be exposed to much higher concentration of mercury vapor that could potentially be more harmful so the idea behind the half bagging is to catch any drips that are falling out but to let the vapor escape into the environment around to be pulled away um in just like a normal air exchange flow um you can also see that the bottom half of these mirrors are bags these are just like polyethylene sheet um or bags uh and the reason for this is that typically um you know gravity is at play here and so what usually happens with the mercury liquid is that it will fall to the bottom of these mirrors or behind the glass or within the frame and it'll kind of collect there um before maybe potentially dripping out and so that's why this design has been implemented um another thing to note you can see this image on the left at one enter and this mirror is being removed from view but it is still being maintained in this upright position so another good practice with this is that mirrors should not be laid down on their back or laid flat the orientation should be maintained um to prevent any kind of disruption to the already unstable situations going on um you can also see that in this picture William is wearing nitrile gloves and we will talk about PPE in a minute but that is part of good practice and another example here instead of the hat bagging uh the this is another option that's been highlighted of sort of using a tray either made out of chloroplast or blueboard um and then mercury drips into the tray but then it can be cleaned up with a mercury spill kit um which I will highlight in the next slide so you can see one of the benefits of this again like the hat bagging is that these are open so that vapor can readily evaporate um I think it's probably good practice for all places that do have mercury uh containing objects on display to go ahead and have a mercury cleanup spill kit um this if anything is just even if you don't have things for actively dripping it's just to be prepared in the case that you do have an accident or a break um I live in Salt Lake City and we are always bracing for um kind of we had a big earthquake in 2020 and we're bracing for other big earthquakes and so that's also another thing to think about just with um within your climate and what concerns you might have being prepared to deal with any kind of emergency contingency or spill um this is just one brand that I've seen used in the past but there are obviously others to choose from the brand is called Newpig and they do do a lot of um not just chemical cleanup kits but also for example like flooding um and they make like snakes and really absorbent materials that can be used in emergency kits um but this would be part of your museum's policies and procedures to have this on hand and to have trained staff know how to use it and typically it includes a dry powder that comes when in contact you would apply to mercury drips it basically creates an amalgam with the mercury and sort of sucks it up so that they bind together and then it comes with a little um almost like a syringe they call it a vacuum but it's not a vacuum like you would think of it's like uh completely uh it's not even electric it's just like a almost like a plastic syringe that you just sort of suck up the um the powder and then of course this would need to be exposed disposed of as chemical waste and I know that most of us don't have a chemical waste disposal if we're not working in a lab environment and with that I would recommend contacting your local health department or your county health department or local fire department or if you have like a university or college in your area maybe even in a high school science class and being able to just sort of dispose of your chemical waste small amounts right and through one of those avenues can be cost saving because typical uh contracts for chemical waste disposal are really really expensive and not practical for something on a small scale like this so again um rules of thumb you're going to want to always be wearing gloves when interacting with these objects regardless of whether or not you're doing a chemical spill cleanup like this this is an extreme example but like we saw William on this previous slide you're always going to want to wear good protective gloves in these cases um if mercury if you have mercury drips on your clothes or your shoes you're going to want to not wash those you're probably going to want to just dispose of them because washing mercury contaminated fabrics in a home washer basically again it's it's like once the cat's out of the bag um you can get mercury trapped in your washing machine you can't get out and then it's just like a potential hazard and contaminant forever um another concern too is if you're in a space where you know there's active dripping and it's not well contained obviously want to get it well contained but if it's not you're going to want to consider like a tie-back booty on your shoe because one of the primary routes of contamination is like stepping in liquid mercury and then taking it home and tracking it around and your pet getting in it or your small child whomever um I am wrapping up I promise because we need time for questions um another good policy procedure to have on hand would be a job hazard analysis form um this is pulled from OSHA and I can link to it but it just basically outlines potential hazards of working let's say in this particular case with this type of object for cleaning up a spill um having information about who to call um you know maybe poison control hotline um things like that just a place to gather resources and to lay out exactly what should happen and who to contact and with that wrapping up I would just like to highlight a few resources this is a recent rapid communication that I helped co-author um with some folks from Wintour and basically it highlights um some of the study that I shared before and we'll actually have the PDF of this linked so it's completely accessible again it's a rapid communication it's a shorter paper it's designed to be fairly accessible um but again I didn't read I didn't invent this wheel um the AIC wiki has a great page on 10 mercury amount of mirrors that has um primary contributor carous cost cost schrager um but others have contributed to it and it just basically you know everything I talked about today it's a great like quick reference of um what to know about these types of objects and you know if you took great good notes great but if not this is this is your go-to um and really important like I was saying you know all these people who've done this work before me um this additional reading is a great bibliography and some of them are linked here to papers and studies that have been done by others so you know just sort of a comprehensive picture of what we know this is another great resource that is also linked on that page and we'll link it um with my slides on the website after this it's a great like one pager again of what to think about you know uh the risks roles responsibilities all this I really like this page and then finally if you want to get in communication with me here's my email address I'm happy to chat anytime and with that I am finished thank you Robin and thank you everybody for attending excellent thank you so much Marie really appreciate that um we already have a couple questions coming in which is great um and I'm gonna hit those one thing though that I wanted to just kind of mention was that you were talking about just how you know basically how people treat these types of things and how it's you know I know I heard growing up by my boomer parents you know oh we used to like eat lead chips you'll be fine you know as a parent I'm like no it's like you cannot do it but it's interesting kind of that that shift in your brain where you have to be like the stuff is dangerous and you need to be aware of it and you need to make sure that you know like people are very aware of of what they can um you know basically just get in contact with and there's a lot of deadly stuff out there so it's a nice kind of reminder on all for sure I think I think awareness and I think culture around that has really shifted at least my experience and I think that's such a great thing um yeah great um so going to some of our questions early on in the presentation you had a picture of a mining tool so someone is asking what is the mining mercury tool called do you happen to know that off the top of your head um I don't but I could find out for you are you I think I think maybe they're talking about that sensor yeah yeah I believe so well definitely we'll grab the q&a and then I'll um grab it so we can get the contact information for you yeah um so here's a good one at what temperature in rh can mercury turn to liquid that's a great question um and I don't know that specifically but I think when we say room temperature we know that that's going to be around like 70 degrees Fahrenheit um and actually this is something I didn't mention before but in terms of like you know the practical application of this in our spaces um keeping your environment where these objects stored uh at a consistent temperature is going to help slow the you know degradation and the chemical processes of deterioration generally um also humidity is a factor with that oops so generally thinking on the drier side um and also cooler side is usually good for keeping these things stable um that said we're not all able to maintain low low standards it's not always practical so then at that point consistency is a great option someone in the chat says negative I think they're saying negative 39 degrees Celsius is it's melting liquid point so I'm not sure I'd have to do a Fahrenheit calculator because I'm not good at doing that in my head but we might confirm that to be sure I think that's different than just it's like yeah yeah because I remember as a kid yeah um you know we still had you know a kid of the 80s and we still had the old school thermometers with the mercury on the inside because it was always like don't don't bite the monitor or don't bite the thermometer that's what I grew up being told so um let's see someone they were kind of asking people were just kind of saying in general what when were these mirrors um actually produced like what decades do you have a rough time period as to when you can kind of see them it's a pretty wide time period and I was reading about it and it looks like they kind of think that they started manufacturing with this technique in the 16th century so I think this was part of my understanding is this was part of like Italian um glass technology was using this mirroring technique but we see it used all the way through up through the 1800s consistently um so anything that was made before like the 20th century you can pretty safely assume that it was 10 mercury even though like I mentioned before too there was also silvering which I believe was at least I mean at least that was happening in in the 1800s but possibly before and so that was that other technique we were talking about like being able to distinguish but again this was the dominant method for manufacturing the mirrors oh I think carrot put something in the chat add in clarification so that's great um but yes yeah perfect yeah I was going to mention carrot carrot is in the audience right now so it's quite a yes to have one of those folks in there and again carrot is the author for that wiki page that I shared and so she is an expert in this area um someone asked could you please tell a bit more about what the surface looks like you mentioned like a star pattern can you specify that a bit yeah so and again there's quite a bit of variation in this I think even just like the different images that I shared there were different um there was like still a range like I said okay well you know it it's a cooler temperature but then also some of the examples I was showing you had kind of like a warmer like there were inclusions areas that had kind of a warmer cast um I think that usually just the way that the corrosion forms uh you oftentimes see like a circular pattern of corrosion um and I think they call it sort of like little like star pattern um but also you'll see like areas where it's glittery it looks kind of sparkly um and so it's no longer really reflective in terms of just like the clarity of like seeing an image on the surface you know as it was intended but you'll see like disrupted little like glittery clumps here and there perfect um yeah and I'll just I'll also note thank you for that answer but also in the chat people are talking a lot about we have a lot of like the the experts of the field hanging out in the chat right now which is quite fun to look at guys apologize if I got anything wrong I think you did perfectly well you did you did excellently it's just fun to kind of see their messages hanging out there again we got a good job for one of them so I think you're doing good but um yeah they're basically saying also watch out for just how you're exposed to the things so you know you can deal with vapor and a couple other ways of exposing um getting exposure to this kind of issue so do you want to talk anymore about that or do you want me just to refer to the chat itself um so I hope that it came through but like what we as a collections care conservation community have generally concluded up to this point from these different studies is that we're not seeing vapor at least in the studies that we've done again I don't want to say like that this isn't happening anywhere because we don't know every scenario but in you know some of the bigger labs and collections that have like been able to do this research we're not seeing vapor levels accumulating to unsafe amounts within the context of the storage spaces that we've analyzed if that makes sense perfect um yeah um going on it said someone said you mentioned reproduction mirrors produced at different times so you know obviously we've seen that across material types people want something old right um would they would they all tend to look new or do they reproduce the look of an old deteriorated mirror so what's been your experience kind of looking at the ones that are reproduction mirrors oh that's a great question um so I've seen both and some of them you'll see just like a totally clear like it's very easy to look at and be like well that's a modern mirror because it's like perfect looking but it's in a historic frame um but they're also and I found this at clony Williamsburg which again clony Williamsburg is maybe a little bit of a special case because they have such an art and a tradition there of historic reproduction creation but there were many mirrors that had been sort of artificially like aged or altered to make them look like ten mercury amalgam and for the most part I think visually like I was able to distinguish between those but sometimes it was really challenging and so I just want to acknowledge that like there's quite a spectrum of artistry out there for creating um sort of faked historical looking mirrored services yeah and I feel like that's kind of common you know I mean like we said you see that across the board um now someone someone asked would you change this might be our last question for today would you change the ten mercury mirrors with fake ones in your opinion what what do you think you would handle that or how would you handle that oh that's a tough question I think it I think it depends I there is not one right answer how about that I think it really depends on the institution and the context of like where it's being displayed how much access um even like staffing turnover you know I could see one institution like if they have limited staffing and limited uh resources to maintain this or worry about these objects like it could be the best choice for them would be to just like replace it and then not have to worry about it anymore if that makes sense um because I acknowledge that a lot of places like don't have the time resources or personnel to like constantly go around and keep cleaning up dripping vape uh dripping mercury and things like that so um yeah there is a one right answer and I hope that that comes through that like you would need to make a decision about this like based on your institutional needs and what's practical for you yep I think that was the perfect answer I think it's going to depend on your institution with the knowledge that obviously if we saw something like the dripping picture you had was crazy picture that William went and like it's made the rounds because it was just like so dramatic right so I think like if you see something like that you'd be like all right let's take this off of that yeah right because like we don't want that do something yeah right exactly but I think what you said beyond this beyond that is exactly right like you're going to be looking at staffing access all those things and we deal with this across the the the types of you know objects when they have hazardous when we know they're hazard I think the safe route is always to take them off of exhibit and to remove them somewhere but I know you know looking at staffing and things like that that might be a big question for your institution for sure sure yeah all right so I'm going to go ahead and close out today's program thank you so much Marie this was really good we we did a practice session earlier this week or last week and I remember telling her like this these are one of those things that I know as many know I relocated from Florida you would go across collections and you would just see these in storage yeah it's everywhere they're everywhere so I think it's really good that the the points you went were really appreciated and we just really appreciate you taking time today to talk about your wonderful publication thanks so much I love c2c cares webinar stories so thank you so much so this recording will be up in a few days I also put links in the chat to resources and a survey which we really would appreciate you guys doing if you can I want to thank c2c care I want to thank f a i c and I am a list for supporting this program again remember we have a bunch of webinars you can register online and you can also register for that course if you're interested so thanks again Marie I hope everyone's having a great summer and we will see you again in a few weeks thanks everyone have a great one bye