POPART consortium organizes an international conference

“Preservation Of Plastic ARTefacts in museum collections”

The POPART project

7 - 9 March 2012, PARIS, France

The organising committee thanks all the participants for the success of POPART conference.

We have been more than 200 participants from all the continents, sharing knowledge on preservation of plastic artefacts.

THEME

Since their rapid development during the first half of the 20th century, plastics have infiltrated every aspect of modern daily life. Unfortunately, many plastics have a short lifetime and degrade via irreversible chemical reactions that result in dramatic changes in appearance and significance to museum artefacts. This symposium aims to present knowledge gained from the European commission funded project POPART over 4 years (http://popart.mnhn.fr/). The symposium will address the fields of identification, assessment of degradation and care of plastics artefacts. A poster session will be organised where new research, conservation treatments or case studies can be presented by symposium participants.

VENUE

Auditorium Colbert

2 rue Vivienne

75002 Paris

PROGRAMME

The programme consists of plenary lectures during the mornings (9 am -1 pm) and workshops or visits in the afternoons.

Download the full programme with speakers here.

March 7th:

Morning: Which plastics are in the collection?

(History, collection assessment and issues)

Afternoon, workshops:
 Cleaning

 Surveying collections

March 8th:

Morning: What is the condition of the collection?

(Damage assessment for plastic artefacts)

Afternoon, workshops:

 Identification of polymers by observational methods
 Portable tools for identification of polymers-NIR, Raman, FTIR
 Polymer analysis (Py GC-MS)

March 9th:

Morning: What are the conservation challenges ?

(Active conservation of plastic artefacts: cleaning, consolidation)

Afternoon: visits

Poster session during the 3 days.

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Time limit for registrations: Friday 17 February 2012

For more information, contact Alban Fournier.

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This symposium is made possible by the EC funding, Grant agreement 212218 for the POPART project*: Preservation of plastic artefacts in museum collections It will be organised by the Centre de recherche sur la conservation des collections (CRCC) in collaboration with the CNRS and the INP.

* The POPART project, devoted to the preservation of polymer artefacts in museums, is funded by the European commission for 42 months from October 2008 to March 2012. Twelve partners from 8 countries are involved bringing a wide range of expertise. It includes the Centre de recherche sur la conservation des collections and the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France both from France, the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), the National Museum of Denmark (Denmark), the Istituto di Fisica Applicata "Nello Carrara" (Italy), the Instituut Collectie Nederland (Netherlands), Polymer Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences (Slovakia), Arc-Nucleart (France), SolMateS BV (Netherlands), Morana RTD (Slovenia), the Centre for Sustainable Heritage UCL (UK) and the Getty Conservation Institute (USA).

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