Volatile Organic Compund Database

The tabs below highlight the chemical compounds that have been confirmed, through analysis, to be harmful to collection materials. They were collated from peer-reviewed articles and publications. They are all part of a document that can be edited and added to over time. If you know of a reference that describes a pollutant not described here, please alert the Materials Working Group and they will add it to the list.

The links are essentially "cheat sheets", meaning they are meant to help you decide whether a product or material is safe for use near art or not.

There are four ways to access the data from AIC's Material Selection and Specification Working Group (MWG) database on Pollutants that Damage Art. Each link below presents the data from the MWG's Airtable database:

• Pollutants known to be damaging to collections
• Sources of Pollutants known to be damaging to collections
• Classes of collection materials affected by these pollutants
• Publications used to create this list of known pollutants