[Nhcoll-l] Lessons learned from tracking entomology drawers

[Douglas Yanega]

On 1/26/23 6:57 AM, Kelly McCauley wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> We’re currently looking at how we track the movement of entomology 
> specimen drawers for the purposes of efficiently recording when they 
> need to be prioritized for spot checking, when they have been spot 
> checked for pest activity, and/or frozen due to an issue. I’m 
> interested to hear how other institutions have managed this and, if 
> you’ve had a system like barcoding in place, has it worked well?
>
> Thank you for any guidance and insight you can provide!
>
A few things:

Decisions as to the perceived need for tracking are also in play.

If a collection is small, then a simple policy of rotating drawers 
through a freezer may be all that is needed. For example, if you can 
freeze 3 drawers every 3 days (i.e., 6 a week) then you can freeze as 
many as 300 drawers in a year. This would not require tracking at all if 
the drawers are rotated *in a fixed sequence*; even a new volunteer or 
curatorial aide will be able to tell which drawers are next when they 
remove the set already in the freezer.

If a collection has relatively low risk from pests, a more relaxed 
policy can be followed than in a facility which is under constant and 
significant threat.

Some collections have the ability to use fumigants such as Dichlorvos, 
others do not, and having fumigants also can mitigate risk.

Finally, there is a fairly evident correlation between usage and risk 
that is self-reinforcing. That is, any drawer that is never opened is in 
the lowest risk class, and this correlation proceeds along the spectrum 
to drawers that are opened on a daily basis, or *left* open, being in 
the highest risk class. A system that arbitrarily checks for infestation 
and treats all drawers as having equal probability of pest attack, is 
probably not appropriate, and becomes increasingly less efficient as a 
collection gets larger. Drawers that are being opened routinely are also 
being scanned for pests *every time they are opened* (assuming that the 
people working in the collection know how to recognize pest attack), so 
they are automatically getting a level of monitoring that is 
appropriate, as it correlates directly to their level of use.

A corollary to this is that recently-acquired material such as incoming 
loans/returns, or material that has had known exposure (e.g., a drawer 
that was inadvertently left open for a weekend) should be frozen as a 
matter of policy.

The end result is that a system of tracking may not be necessary at all, 
and control can be reasonably effective if a collection simply follows 
sensible hygienic and curatorial practices. As far as personal 
experience, I manage a collection of some 4 million specimens, stored in 
some 5500 drawers, and we don't have a tracking system for pest 
monitoring, nor a freezer rotation schedule, nor a spot-checking system 
as such, and we are not able to use fumigants; drawers are scrutinized 
as they are used, and freezing is used almost exclusively for incoming 
material and exposed material. I've been here 24 years, and have found 
carpet beetles eating specimens maybe 7 or so times in all that time, 
affecting maybe 3-5 specimens per instance, and probably half of those 
were things that had come back as loan returns. In our case, we would 
not expect that a significant investment of time and energy into more 
rigorous monitoring would have an equally significant payoff. For us it 
is a zero-sum scenario; we have only one full time curator (myself), and 
limited budget for part-time aides, and tens of thousands of specimens 
being added to the collection each year, faster than we can process 
them. An hour used for tracking or monitoring pests would be an hour 
that higher-priority needs in the collection were being neglected. If we 
had dozens of volunteers, to the point where some of them had no more 
productive tasks that they could be assigned than pest monitoring, 
*then* the equation might change.

Ultimately, it's all about whether the costs (and risks) and benefits 
are being properly balanced.

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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