Amber Listserv / Amber Care

[Maury Bramson]

I have recently begun an amber collection (mostly Dominican), and have 
some questions about care/preservation.  Hopefully, some of you will be 
kind enough to share some of your experiences.  I have gone through 
literature on this, but still have questions.

What causes the crazing in amber and how can one avoid it?  Exposure to 
sun and wind are bad and are easy to avoid.  Is it enough to keep the 
amber in a dark place inside the standard small rectangular plastic boxes? 
Is there still too much air there that can dry the specimen out?  Or is it 
the oxygen, or maybe its most active component, ozone, that causes the 
problems?  Is "stale" air (with the ozone having dissipated) okay?  Will 
packing in cotton to remove most of the air help?  Are the answers to 
these questions really known, or is there mostly just folklore?

How important is temperature?  Will indoor summer temperatures in the 80+ 
range cause more rapid decay?  Is the colder, the better (down to 50 or 
so) accurate?

One can go through extra effort to preserve amber, such as keeping the 
surrounding air moist and perhaps applying a sealant to the amber.  Both 
mean more effort, and I'm not sure I'm in a position to do the latter. 
(In addition to safety issues, the latter would presumably involve a 
certain amount of trial and error, and possibly ruining specimens.)  How 
important is this?

What do museums do to preserve their amber?  Do they all more or less 
follow the same procedure?

Under normal circumstances, what is a reasonable expectation for the 
lifetime of amber, once it has been excavated?