Working with Museums, Libraries, and Archives to Use IPM to Prevent and Combat Infestations
Recorded October 26, 2023
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Description
Rachael Perkins Arenstein is a partner in A.M. Art Conservation, LLC, a private practice in the New York area with a specialization in preventive care. Photo by Don Giles.
Since the late 1990s, museums, libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions have adapted agricultural integrated pest management (IPM) techniques to suit our specific collection risks and work practices. While combating pests is now considered an essential part of good collection care, its implementation is time consuming and often unappealing, resulting in variable success and implementation across the field. This webinar will assess some of the most important successes in conducting IPM in museums, libraries, and archives over the past decades, while also examining where improvements are needed. Future trends utilizing newer technologies such as remote monitoring, artificial intelligence, and data analysis will also forecast where we anticipate the field is going. The focus of the webinar however will be identifying some of the ways in which cultural heritage institutions provide different challenges for pest management professionals than seen with conventional clients. We will also introduce resources developed over the past 20 years by the MuseumPests Working Group to educate the cultural heritage community on preventing and combating pest infestations in ways that are safe and effective, and how our fields can work together to meet the needs to preserve our collective cultural heritage.
Rachael Perkins Arenstein
Rachael Perkins Arenstein is a partner in A.M. Art Conservation, LLC, a private practice in the New York area with a specialization in preventive care. She has implemented and conducted IPM programs in institutions of various sizes in the U.S. and abroad. She worked on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Move Project and its extensive pest management program from 2001–2004. She is a founding member and current Co-Chair of the Integrated Pest Management Working Group which created and supports the museumpests.net website and the PestList listserv. She has held positions at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, NMAI, the Peabody Museum of Art & Archaeology, the American Museum of Natural History amongst others. Her conservation degree is from the Institute of Archaeology, University of London.
Library photo by Nico Paix (CC BY 2.0, flic.kr/p/8xF2zX).