Moth traps - a cautionary tale

 Well, we had a near miss up at the Athenaeum today.

Like a lot of similar bodies we use sticky moth traps a bit like the ones below to minimaise the risks of insect damage 

all good.

Good practice is that you put the moth traps in the display cabinets, date them, check them in a month or so, and either replace them or remove them as not required.

These traps work by having a layer of glue on the base of the triangle and the idea is that the insect or other nasty gets caught in the glue.

And now for the cautionary part of the story.

I was cataloguing some nineteenth century novels this morning and found a moth trap that had been placed on top of the novels in the display case.

The books had been wrapped in mylar bags (a bit like kitchen ziplocs) as they were in poor condition, with broken spines, insect damage and the like.

The insect traps had been dated to late 2019/early 2020 and had not been removed or replaced, and the glue, which is thixotropic, had flowed off the trap and on to the mylar bags.

Fortunately no damage had been done to the books and it was simply a matter of removing the moth trap and then replacing the sticky bags with new ones.

The dates are significant, just before the pandemic when everything was locked down, and importantly, a lot of voluntary organisations saw a significant turn over, with people simply not coming back after the lockdowns were over, and other people taking their place.

This of course meant that any handover of duties was patchy at best, and some things simply got missed.

The solution is simple, a search and destroy mission for any other outdated moth traps, as well as checking for damage, and putting in place a task calendar to ensure that the traps are checked regularly in the future.

And why am I airing our dirty linen in public like this?

Well, we're not the only volunteer run organisation in the world, and I'm sure other organisations must have had a breakdown in procedure like we did.

And I'd like to emphasise that no one did the wrong thing, it's just that in a period of churn things get lost. In this case we got away with it, another time we might not be so lucky...