Plastics Reference Collection

One of this project’s objectives is to establish a collection of well-characterized standards or reference materials to support analytical studies of plastics in museum collections, treatment studies, workshops, and other educational activities.

The Plastics Reference Collection, part of the Conservation Institute’s Reference Collection for Materials Analysis, includes objects and samples made of natural, semisynthetic, and synthetic polymers, representing the most common plastics found in museum collections. References are chosen and collected not only considering plastics compositions but also the processing methods and conditions. The aim is to provide examples of the whole range of plastics materials and methods of production used to make plastic objects, as well as a complete overview of typical degradation signs affecting each polymer.

To establish this collection, the project team is working with Colin Williamson, a plastics technologist and expert in noninvasive identification of early plastics, to determine a defining set of selection and documentation criteria. Williamson has donated a large part of his unique plastics collection to the Plastics Reference Collection.

In addition to Williamson's donation, the Plastics Reference Collection includes SamCo, the sample collection of plastics references and objects created to support the analytical studies carried out during the POPART project.

The Plastics Reference Collection is cataloged and searchable. Each reference has its own record that includes reference description, material, polymer acronym, trade name, dimension, date, artist/designer, manufacturer, source/supplier, method of production and condition. Links are provided to analytical data gained from the analysis of the references.

The Colin Williamson collection of plastics trade literature is now open for use by qualified researchers. This collection of trade literature consists of technical information, manufacturing and design texts, and marketing materials dating from the 1930s to 1997. The finding aid to the collection can be accessed at http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2022m8.

In addition, many of his donated books are now available for use and can be found in the Getty Library catalog at https://primo.getty.edu.