This training sets out our guidelines and best practice for integrated pest management.

What is Integrated Pest Management (IPM)?

One of the risks to heritage collections are pests – that is insects, rodents, birds, or other animals that can cause harm to collections.

To effectively combat the threat posed by pests, heritage organisations have adopted the principles of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) from the food and stored products industry.

The key principles of IPM are to maximise use of limited resources and consider all aspects of your operation to create an integrated delivery that prevents infestation. In practice this means implementing the following steps:

• Monitoring for pests
• Deter pest activity by making the environment unsuitable for pests
• Treatment specific to where and what the problem is

This will prevent infestation before it takes hold, which is better for the collection and more cost effective.

Identifying the risks

The first step to effective pest management is understanding and identifying the risk areas and monitoring these.

To thrive pests need certain conditions; food, shelter, and favourable environment (suitable relative humidity and temperature). Identifying where these conditions are found within your buildings can act as a starting point for monitoring.

Food to sustain pests can be found within the collections for example, fur, textiles, feathers, entomology, wood, furniture, basketry, and other plant-based material as well as herbarium collections, library, and archive collections. Remember that some edible materials may not be obvious at first glance; papier mâché may be made from animal glue and cellulose, or small pieces of textile may be present in objects that seem largely inedible (like felt feet on scientific instruments).

Some example objects are shown below:

Food can also be found in other areas of the building which highlights the need for an integrated approach. Consider office areas, staff welfare areas, public spaces where food is stored and consumed by people, as well as shops and education activities (handling collections as well as materials for craft activities etc. which could also provide food to sustain pests).

Shelter can be found in areas that are undisturbed for periods of time, making museums stores an ideal breeding spot.

Environment is important to the successful breeding of some museum pests. Some require a high relative humidity (RH) to survive which means that materials or collections that are damp are particularly susceptible to attack from some species. Some pests require the temperature to be above a certain level, otherwise at cooler temperatures their lifecycle is slowed down. This can be used to manage pests – for example you may be able to lower the temperature of a store without adversely raising the RH.