Conservation around the Millennium (Hungarian National Museum, 2001)
Pages - 137
examined the air on June 11 in the room where the books were temporarily placed in the central building of the Franciscan Order in Buda. The air samples taken during a half-an-hour and a one-hour period did not contain an evincible amount of ethylene oxide. Only during the two-hours long sample taking showed some small amount, 0.07 mg/m3 of ethylene oxide in the air sample. Certain health related concerns were raised after the six months passed and the restoration of certain pieces of the material disinfected with ethylene oxide was about to begin. There were no examinations made before in Hungary to determine how much gas residue stayed and for how long it’s kept in porous organic materials, such as paper, leather, canvas, parchment and wood. Another unknown factor was whether any possible disinfectant gas residues were in fact contaminating the working environment of restorers, thus endangering their good health. As far as the first question was concerned we had figures from related literature to rely on (1), however the only way we could get an answer to the second and more practical problem was through a labour health examination. In light of the different components of the books and the exhibited figures we thought that only a certain part of the ethylene oxide bound by the material could get loose during the airing out of the disinfecting cabin and during the stay in the storage room and that the remaining amount of ethylene oxide was indeed going to leave the materials during the restoring and use (moving, opening, turning pages) of the books. As we haven’t read about related practice the available literature, we felt that it was necessary to carry out an air contamination examination, where we could create circumstances as close to those present during actual restoration activities as possible. With the help of such an examination we could determine the actual amount of ethylene oxide concentrate a restorer might inhale during work. The examination was conducted at the request of Ars Alba Bt by dr. Erzsébet Réffy laboratory manager chemical engineer and Tibor Horváth chemical technician of the Labour Health Laboratory of the Capital Institution of ÁNTSZ. Following we are including excepts of the examination records prepared by dr. Erzsébet Réffy. Circumstances and Methods of Taking Samples The restoration activities applied during the sample taking were determined by Péter Schramkó and were carried out with the assistance of three restorers from the National Széchényi Library. The restoration activities applied were as follows: 1. Taking the books apart into separate sheets and sweeping the dust-like dirt and mould off of the sheets with a brush (dry cleaning); 2. Washing twenty pages from the dry cleaned books in lukewarm water, changing the water several times (wet cleaning) and drying the sheets in the air between sheets of blotting paper; 3. Drying the wet sheets with hairdryers and ironing them with hot irons (we applied this method in order to determine the effect of heat on ethylene oxide emission). These procedures were carried out by the restorers in the same chemical cabin with the door rolled down approximately 40 cm on two books printed on rag- paper and disinfected with ethylene oxide approximately five months earlier. These procedures were carried out on one book without operating the extractor fan and the ventilation and in case of the other book the fan was used. Each 137
