Conservation of metals in scientific and technological heritage

Abstract

Scientific and technological collections play a key role in the construction of the scientific and technological memory of our societies. As with other types of heritage, these collections gather objects belonging to our common cultural inheritance, which should be preserved for future generations. However, conservation of this heritage presents a big and specific challenge, from several points of view. One of the main characteristics of these objects is their use over time. This causes, in addition to its material deterioration, a threat to their valorization, since they are not considered to be something worth to be preserved, but common objects with a limited life span that are disposed afterwards. Due to their everyday life presence, even objects that are preserved in museums are not as regarded as they should be. On the other side, from a material point of view, the variety and coexistence of different materials in the objects pose difficulties for their conservation: due to the different environmental conditions required for the optimal conservation of different materials, incompatibilities between different materials of the same object, and specific threats derived from the working condition of the objects. Amongst the different materials that make up objects in these collections, metals have a special relevance, both considering their abundance and the great variety of their nature, manufacturing techniques and finishing. This variety, and the aforementioned specific characteristics of scientific and technological heritage, makes their conservation specially challenging, requiring the development of methodologies and techniques specially adapted to them. In this sense, in the present work a new approach for improving the conservation of metals in scientific and technological heritage, based in three complementary strategies is proposed and studied: 1) preventive conservation, regarding the conservation problems from the point of view of interaction with the environment and other materials, as well as the identification of deterioration agents to adopt the most effective actions, 2) remedial conservation, analyzing the behaviour of protection systems for these metals, including the development and assessment of advance coatings and their comparison with traditional methods has been analysed and 3) valorization and conservation criteria, with the aim of promoting social awareness of the value of these objects and, in connection with the previous activities, establishing recommendations for their preservation which contribute, based on objective data, to make museological and conservation decisions.