[Nhcoll-l] Compactors in collections

[Lennart Lennuk]

Thank you for raising this topic! I am also very interested in this topic, so if you send any letters or material to Ann, please but me on the list ☺
Do the guardrails are really mandatory? Of course in wet-collections. But ohter collections maybe its comfortable to not use those and make shelving not slipperi instead?

Best regards
Lennart Lennuk
Head of collections
Estonian Museum of Natural History
(+372) 6603404, 56569916



From: Nhcoll-l [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Gali Beiner
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2021 6:35 PM
To: Ann Bogaerts <ann.bogaerts at plantentuinmeise.be>
Cc: NHCOLL-new <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Compactors in collections

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<mailto: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

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