By Cathedral Librarian, Emma Laws
Library and archive collections contain all sorts of delicious materials for bugs: paper, parchment, wooden boards on medieval bindings, textiles (including velvet and cloth bindings), animal glue and gelatine. If bugs aren’t eating collections, they might be nesting in them.
The most common pests in libraries and archives are insects, such as wood-boring furniture beetles, wood weevils, carpet beetles, biscuit beetles, clothes moths, silverfish and booklice. Adult insects can fly or crawl into buildings or ‘hitchhike’ on people but it’s actually the larvae of insects that cause the most damage to collections. Pests can spread quickly, so it’s important to spot infestations early – and deal with them.
We’re lucky at the Cathedral because we have an environmentally-controlled Library and Archive store that offers a pretty inhospitable home for most insects and we don’t have a lot of people wandering in and out. Even so, we don’t take any chances.
Last year we initiated a new Integrated Pest Management Plan, which includes monitoring using traps, checking objects known to be vulnerable to insect infestation, good housekeeping, and environmental monitoring.
We use standard museum-quality sticky blunder traps, which catch pests on the move. Monitoring traps involves setting them, inspecting them four times a year (to cover various stages of insect life cycles), identifying and counting any insects caught in the traps, looking for other signs of infestation, replacing the traps, and recording and analysing data in a spreadsheet.
We currently have 17 traps across the first floor of the West Wing and you’ll see some in the cases of the Treasures Gallery. Traps are best tucked away in dark, undisturbed corners where there’s little ventilation. Fortunately, so far we’ve not caught concerning numbers of anything. In fact, sadly, we catch more spiders than anything else. Spiders are our friends when it comes to pest control – it’s worth encouraging a few spiders at home to keep a lid on unwanted visitors.
Over the past couple of weeks, our work experience students have been involved in checking our blunder traps and counting and recording any pests. Traps are a great way to observe the type and number of pests but the best thing we can do is to prevent infestations occurring in the first place. We all have a role to play, for example, not throwing food away in office bins and wiping our feet when we enter a building. Our summer task in the Library and Archives is to do a thorough hoover of the store to get rid of surface dust, which insects can use to build nests. By the autumn, it will be time to check the traps again – and so it goes on.