How permanent are mountants? An overview of the conservation state of the G. Deflandre microscope slides collection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The French National Museum of Natural History (MNHN, Paris) hosts Georges Deflandre’s valuable collection, assembled from 1920, and composed of about 13,000 microscope slides. The present condition report of the collection was performed through a detailed inventory of 885 slides and highlighted the mounting techniques used by Deflandre (medium, sealant, dyes). First, the recipes were documented using the available literature. Then, an inventory was undertaken using a spreadsheet with pre-defined entries, designed to facilitate analysis of collected data. Well-documented labels and some chemical analyses were used to fill in the fields. More than 50 combinations of dyes, 19 mounting media and three sealants were used. Regarding the media condition, attention was focused on three major points affecting the observation of the specimens and the long-term conservation of the slides: the color, the mechanical degradation, and the presence of air. Most widespread media in Deflandre’s collection are Canada balsam, coumarone resin and kumadax, all exhibiting yellow or orange tints due to oxidation, but not impacting the condition of specimens. Glycerin jelly was the least stable mounting media with evidence of darkening and shrinking. In general, no relationship between yellowing and mechanical degradation was noticed, nor was a link between the macroscopic sealant degradation and the drying of the mounting medium. Cross-referencing information between the literature and the collection allowed a better understanding of the mounting practices. Additionally, observing these 50–100 year old slides was one of the best ways to assess the durability of mounting media through time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".