A Team Approach to IPM
The Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto was affected by an incident involving the mis-application of fumigant. This could happen any-where because certified alternative agents and treatment methods have not been widely estab-lished since the use of methyl bromide was abol-ished.
Additionally, most museums outsource pest management rather than handling it as part of their routine work.
Activities
The curators of the museum took this experi-ence seriously and changed their general man-agement system to create a better environment. The curators learned about IPM (integrated pest management) through benchmarking with other museums and attending training sessions on cultural property conservation.
After the training, the curators realized that environmental control was not handled as part of daily work. They had also been unaware that temperature and humidity in the museum were not uniform. The facility had been rebuilt, and the curators hadn’t realized the need to create a suitable indoor environment themselves.
They were prompt in starting to record the appearance of pests and mold, and also began to monitor temperature and humidity by setting traps and hygrothermographs. After the informa-tion gathered had been circulated among all staff, one of them created a pest control map. This clarified where pests tended to gather, which changed the approach of the curators and the whole staff.
One curator says, “We now use hair-bundled temperature-humidity recorders and digital recorders that we hadn’t used before. We’ve also started to do simple things, like ventilating the shelves and dusting the indirect lighting on the ceiling.”
The curators and other staff have been united by the concept of IPM.
IPM
Most museum curators control only the temperature and humidity of a limited area with air conditioning at their facilities. However, in reality, temperature and humidity vary because of visitors and fixtures such as display cases. This is also true of storage rooms. As a result, cura-tors need to survey actual conditions at the facil-ity rather than relying on machines.
One curator says,
“This museum is only about 10 years old, and we’ve just started using IPM. We think it’s important to change our ideas in order to integrate IPM into our daily work.”
“We feel IPM is a service for visitors, too. It has influenced not only our ideas but also our man-agement,” says a staff member of the General Affairs Department. Up to now, treatment of cultural property has been considered the task of the curator. However, drawing on the resources of the whole staff of the museum in order to protect cultural property provides an interesting example for other museums.
Kumamoto Modern Art Museum
Address: 2-3 Kamitori Chuo-ku Kumamoto-shi
Opening hours: 10:00-20:00
URL: http://www.camk.or.jp/
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