Dear Conservators, collections staff and IPM’ers

Over a few years, on the other thread in this forum, and in particularly at a meeting held during the Global EMu User Conference last year there has been a growing desire to improve the potential of EMu as a tool to facilitate the preventive conservation of collections – and more specifically in relation to insect pests. Since that meeting the Smithsonian NMNH and Natural History Museum, London have been collaborating on the attached document as a mechanism to promote wider discussion on the topic and hopefully arrive at a consistent model.

Your feedback on the attached discussion document would be greatly appreciated.  Please reply in this thread for all to view.

SYNOPSIS
There are many factors that present a risk to the long-term preservation of our national and international heritage yet with ongoing improvements to EMu, driven by the user community (e.g. Conservation, Pest Events), the centralisation of documentation is providing collections staff with an invaluable and powerful resource to inform collections care strategies. 

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It is possible to observe imperceptible changes in objects through a history of condition reports and, through continued monitoring, it is possible to see the effectiveness of any stabilisation treatment.

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It is now also possible to assess the potential risk of damage to collections from the background population of insects within a building infrastructure, and use this information to develop strategies and protocols to deter these populations

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What currently isn’t possible within EMu is to effectively highlight the objects and their locations that become infested by insect pests and relate this incident to any shift in the background pest distribution.

It is not possible to relate treatments of infested specimen and storage  (e.g. freezing, constrain etc) to an infestation event, and it certainly isn’t possible within EMu to assess whether changes in a specimen’s state, or changes in the dynamic of an insect pest population (positive or negative) is influenced by changes in environment.

The attached document is a sort of project brief that sets out the rationale for the improvements and suggests client developments to achieve the goals. Obviously each implementation of EMu is different and some of these limitations may already be present in one form or another.   What this exercise hopes to achieve is some degree of client-wide standardisation, if that is at all possible.

Many thanks for your time and consideration

Caitlin (formerly SI-NMNH)
Dave (NHM, London)

KE-EMu-IPM-Module-Proposed-Redevelopment---A-discussion-document-v10-18-08-2015.docx