April,
As another follow-up, I spoke with my state OSHA office (and I live in one of the states that adopted all of the federal OSHA regulations), and there is nothing in the regulations or the official Letters of Interpretation regarding service animal safety. You would need to contact the federal level OSHA office and ask them to create a Letter of Interpretation for determining whether service animal safety is your responsibility or employer responsibility. Another option is to consult your state human rights division, if your state has one. Another option is to consult animal rights groups that have knowledge of state or federal animal protection laws. As I said before, I am not a lawyer, but it sounds like you are responsible for the safety of your service animal and would need to negotiate terms of employment that would keep the service animal away from hazards. I have a feeling that the authors did not consider service animal safety while writing the regulations, or perhaps they did not consider the possibility that employees with service animals are physically capable of doing jobs that require PPE.
As for plastics, it is not ideal but sometimes necessary. For example, I have a length of braided wire in my collection, taken from a Japanese communications cable found on Tinian in 1944. The interior of the cable has a white powdery insulation. We do not have a sufficient budget for private testing, and higher up is wary of inviting OSHA for a free consultation, so I am making the assumption that the powdery insulation is asbestos, as that was a common cable insulator during that time. It naturally needs to be contained in order to protect staff (and service animals). Another example would be a radium-based historical artifact, or perhaps a uranium ore mineral sample in a non-science museum. Those objects will generate radon over time, and that radon needs to be contained, and staff (and service animals) need to be shielded from the radiation. In most cases, plastic is sufficient to block alpha and beta particles and to contain radon. And then staff opening that containment need to do so in a well-ventilated area while wearing a respirator, but that is better than continuous exposure to something that can cause lung cancer in staff (and service animals).
Thank you,
Michael R.
From: topladave .
Sent: Monday, March 27, 2017 3:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MUSEUM-L] Service dogs in museums
As a conservator and museum consultant I am now more concerned about,
" In our collections here, everything is wrapped in museum quality plastic. Granted the collection here deals with metal and wood materials, would other more fragile materials be affected adversely to dander or fur?"
Wrapping metal and wood objects in plastic is usually not a good practice. First, many plastics outgass organic acids where even minute amounts will corrode metals. And even supposedly safe plastics can contain residual acids if they are commercially made and not checked for acids. And then enclosing a metal or wood object in plastic creates a microenvironment as far as temperature and Rh, that can cause adverse reactions to the objects if the exterior environment is significantly different. I have seen metal objects peppered with flash corrosion from condensation when enclosed in plastic and also wood objects and paintings and paper objects with mold growth from this too. And I've seen silver etched from being wrapped in bubble wrap. That is actually a far more serious concern than pet dander. Better housings and storage uses a good HVAC system to control temperature and relative humidity, and sometimes soft archival tyvek, that allows air exchange but not liquid water to reach objects. Sometimes in shelf storage plastic is drapped over the front of the shelves to prevent water from accidents or the sprinkler system from getting the collections directly wet. But wrapping in plastic really isn't the best current practice for most collections.
Cheers!
Dave
David Harvey
Senior Conservator & Museum Consultant
Los Angeles CA USA
www.cityofangelsconservation.weebly.com
On Mar 27, 2017 1:35 PM, "Legatt, April Mary" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It would be different if the dog is an emotional support animal but as stated before, in this case it is specifically a service dog. She is trained to perform tasks. Is there any direct concerns that dander would pose to a collection that human dander is exempt?