[NHCOLL-L:44] Re: slide restoration

[Steve Halford]

On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Birger Neuhaus wrote:

> Dear TAXACOMERS,
> 
> reviewing my slide collection of "worms" up to 150 years old I realized
> that an increasing number of slides suffers from different problems:

(snip)

> 3. Slides from the rotifer collection of Charles Rousselet (slides made
> around 1910) show white precipitations in the periphery of the sealed
> coverslip. The embedding medium is glass-clear and not yellowish as in
> other material from that time.


Charles Messenger (University of Nebraska State Museum) gave the talk
"salvaging oxidized microscope slides" at the fifth meeting of the Society
for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) in Chicago,
1990.  As I recall, his technique involved freezing the slides to
facilitate removal of the coverslip and scraping off the oxidized
precipitate around the specimen.  I don't know if he ever published the
technique -- perhaps in a contemporary issue of "Colections Forum?"

HTH

Steve (halford at sfu.ca)
Museum Technician
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C., Canada