[Nhcoll-l] Compactors in collections

[Gali Beiner]

Hello Ann,

We've recently completed the installation of compactors for our mammals,
fish, herpetology and invertebrate collections. The mammals collection is a
dry (skeletal) collection, the others are wet collections. In the future,
we may consider doing the same for our herbarium - the problem this time
around being that it wasn't in a basement floor so floor weight carrying
capability limited our possibilities. The other collections were in
basement floors.

The basic planning considerations included:
1. Choice between electric and manually-moved shelving (problems with
electric moving elsewhere made us choose manual. We're quite happy with
that, the shelves are easy to move)
2. Shelf carrying capacity (I actually weighed the specimens in random
shelves all over the collections to be sure of our requirements in this
respect) - this includes how shelves are constructed and whether we could
adjust their spacing)
3. Ventilation (since most of the moved collections were in liquids)
4. Guardrails to prevent things from falling off a moving shelf
(detachable, to enable putting in and taking out large / tall specimens) -
we had some discussions about how to design these

That's just off the top of my head in a minute's notice, there were other
issues of course! Will send images on Sunday if reminded about it.
Space-wise, the entire fish collection which had filled up the entire hall
took up only half that same space when moved into compactors. We spent a
lot of time measuring and planning different shelving layouts and making
sure that the shelving company really understood what we wanted - they did
actually measure and count things differently  because their reasoning was
different, so that is an important aspect!

Please feel free to ask further questions on Sunday plus ask for images.

Cheers,

Gali

בתאריך יום ג׳, 14 בדצמ׳ 2021, 18:12, מאת Ann Bogaerts ‏<
ann.bogaerts at plantentuinmeise.be>:

> Hello everybody,
>
> We wish to renovate our herbarium with 4 milj. specimens and we want to
> get some feedback from other institutions who already renovated or renewed
> their collection buildings.
>
> One of our main questions is the use of compactors yes or no? So what is
> your opinion about this? How much space do you save using a compactor and
> how is it working with this kind of system? For which collections do you
> use it?
>
> We are really interested in the do's and don'ts and it would also be nice
> if you could send us a picture of the compactors you use.
>
> Thanks a lot and enjoy your evening (day),
>
> Ann
>
> --
>
> <http://groenepioniers.be/bioblitz/>
>
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