Hello Jon,

Part of any guidelines now or in the future should be:

KEEP RECORDS 
KEEP RECORDS 
KEEP RECORDS 

And also including the stipulation of where the records themselves are to
be kept, etc., in the usual manner.

I worked for years at the now-defunct (shut by government after a hundred
years or more, and after Thatcher/Reagan style reforts to all government
here - on basis that it was costing the people of the State too much)
Geological and Mining Museum in Sydney.   Should anyone be interested in
that museum I am writing history of it and if you contact me I can point
you to my file on it in the net 'cloud'.

Anyway, we of course had large lumped of davidite (type area is in NSW) are
some torbernite and carnotite etc. (also asbestos from the Great
Serpentinite Belt but back then nobody thought in Sydney museums thought
there was anything wrong with asbestos).

When concern mounted about radioactive minerals they were all taken off
display and put in a room.

Later on where the mineralogist realised they were just opposite his desk
through a very flimsy bit of internal office walls partitioning, then got
all shifted down to a brick room about the size of an outside toilet which
was at the back of the garage in the museum's yard.  That room was already
being used to store "dangerous" goods in, like explosives.

But still later the garage-man who has his desk up the back of the garage
(where part of a government fleet was stored or controlled from) realised
that all this radioactive stuff was sitting opposite him separated by a
brick wall.

Now all these uranium ores really were regarded as well below any harmful
radioactivity level.

Still there was person concern that if a lot of specimens were put together
then things could get hazardous.

So just to be on the safe side whenever staff got concerned radioactive
ores would be moved on elsewhere and away from the person who had developed
concern.

The were also other reasons for doing this .. namely that concerns could go
psychosomatic and end up in employee terminations, court cases and all rest
of it.  The was lots of known precedent of that.  So always the simplest
thing was to more the concern-causing materials whenever and wherever any
concerns arose.

And so it came to pass that the materials were moved again, from out of the
little brick room behind the garage.

But where to?

I don't know ... and seemingly nobody does (of if so I have not yet found
them).

Because after the museum was closed by the government masses (most) of its
records somehow went missing.

Anyone know any stories like the above?   I might like to include some in
my museological musings and rememberances.


Best Regards,



John

(Sydney, Australia)



~~~~~~~~

At 04:23 PM 8/11/2012 +0000, Jon Radley wrote:

>Warwickshire Museum's collection includes roughly eighty radioactive and
asbestos minerals (the usual species) that might require moving in the near
future, as a discrete collection, to a new store. Does anyone have
guidelines (published or otherwise) for this operation - necessity for
specialist materials/boxes etc., above and beyond normal mineral
requirements? At present the specimens are dispersed amongst the
Hey-classified collection (in wooden drawers): radioactives essentially
unprotected in card trays and asbestos double-bagged in grip-seal polybags.

>Thanks,

>Jon Radley
>Curator of Natural Sciences