Preservation
10/9/06
6:11 PM
Page 214
THE MUSEUM
PRESERVING A HERITAGE By Craig Collins
From architects to curators to restorers, the National Museum of the Marine Corps wages war against a museum’s cruelest enemies: light, temperature, dust, moisture – and the passage of time
Abelsma compares the long-term effects of light – even controlled low-level light such as that found in the most hospitable museum environments – to the collective effect of thousands of footsteps on an old staircase. “Everybody contributes something,” he says, “but nobody realizes it. In a way, it’s almost like we’re determining how many more generations are going to look at that flag.” Of course, the best way to preserve artifacts as beloved as the Iwo Jima flag would be to seal them all away in a darkened, climate-controlled room, away from human contact. Abelsma is one of many at the museum who, realizing the absurdity of the alternative, has devoted his career to an intricate balancing act: struggling to preserve these artifacts while releasing them into an environment where they can be viewed and appreciated by the public.
First, Do No Harm The roughly 30,000 objects in the Marine Corps’ historical collection of artifacts are divided into four broad categories: Abelsma’s uniforms and heraldry; aviation (aircraft flown by Marine aviators, aviation ordnance, aeronautica); ordnance (firearms, edged weapons, wheeled and tracked vehicles, artillery, and associated equipment); and the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection, comprised of more than 8,000 works of art. The job of documenting and caring for these objects is divided among the collections management, curatorial, and restorations staffs. In a museum, standards are established for limiting certain factors known to cause damage: light, moisture, and even dust, which is, according to museum specialist Mike Starn, a bigger problem than most people realize. “When bugs chew on material,” he says, “it’s not that they’re literally chewing the material. They’re eating the dust. The material just happens to get in the way. And so dust is just as big an enemy as sunlight, actually any bright light.”
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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps
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emorial Day weekend 2004 was stressful for Neil Abelsma, uniform and heraldry curator for the National Museum of the Marine Corps. He had helped arrange the temporary loan of the “second” Iwo Jima flag, the bigger and more famous of the two raised on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, to the Smithsonian Institution for its four-day National World War II Reunion. “They had their light levels adjusted,” says Abelsma. “They had a little barrier set up. And they had signs everywhere: ‘No Photography.’ And there was even a guard.” But for some reason, the urge to take flash photographs was irrepressible among the hundreds who viewed the flag that weekend. “I went in there, and this poor guard,” Abelsma remembers – “by the end of the day, he was hoarse.” A widely held view among museum visitors is that the “no flash photography” rule is a way to force them to buy more postcards at the gift shop. But it’s a much more serious matter. Anyone who has ever peeked behind old window curtains will see the jaundiced look of fabric that has been exposed to the sun for too long. The flash of a camera, though brief, emits light that is many times brighter and hotter than direct sunlight. “And the light doesn’t just change the color,” says Abelsma. “It breaks down the fabric’s structure.” Of the items in the museum’s collection, the ones Abelsma is charged with overseeing – including flags, uniforms, documents, and medals and their ribbons – are among the most fragile, because many are made, either wholly or partly, of natural fibers that contain cellulose. When light strikes a cellulose molecule, it causes a chemical reaction in which the molecule literally ruptures – which not only results in physical damage but also releases, as a byproduct, a molecule of sulfuric acid. For just about anything you can imagine a museum might wish to collect, sulfuric acid is, to put it mildly, not a good thing.
