Museum Health Hazards

As part of a years-long collaboration with the Purdue School of Health and Human Sciences, the IUPUI Museum Studies Program, and a local museum to research and address various health hazards in the museum and its collection, I worked to identify and mitigate hazardous materials in museum collections. The work addressed the presence of common museum hazards like dust, mold, and various heavy metals, as well as those more specific to the collection - formaldehyde, and laboratory chemicals - throughout the institution and in the collection. The team used XRF testing, Bio-Tape slide sampling, air sampling, chemical inventorying, blacklight testing, and archival and academic research to identify these hazards. As the Health Hazards Fellow, I produced a complete inventory and the associated hazard information of the chemical collections on display in the museum and provided additional recommendations on the care of the collections.

As a result of the research conducted, our student team produced three posters for the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Expo (2022 and 2023), informing industrial hygiene specialists of the importance of addressing hazards in museum collections and spaces. This research also resulted in a presentation scheduled for the Association of Midwest Museums conference in July of 2023 on the value of collaboration in this kind of research.