Relaxing climate control

Mark McCormick-Goodhart <mark [at] aardenburg-imaging__com>

>The research my colleagues, Dr. Marion Mecklenburg, Dr. Charles
>Tumosa, Dr. David Erhardt, and I  did at the Smithsonian Institution
>back in the 1990s on this very topic was understandably
>controversial, i.e., we sought to determine the magnitude of
>environmental fluctuations that maintain a safe environmental range
>for appropriate collection care at a time when a majority of experts
>believed that flatlining the museum environment using rigid HVAC
>control was fundamentally the optimum answer.  The determination of
>safe and therefore allowable environmental fluctuations requires a
>materials science approach to evaluate the problem correctly. That
>our materials research yielded more forgiving tolerances than many
>conservators felt intuitively comfortable with, and for us to
>further suggest that significant energy and cost savings do indeed
>accrue as a result of relaxing rigid HVAC tolerances led to harsh
>criticism of our work.  I hope that this time around the discourse
>will be more civil and that conservators with an open mind and
>interest in this topic will take heart.  Purposefully
>adjusting/relaxing indoor environmental controls to produce energy
>savings and the optimum care of collections are not mutually
>exclusive goals.

Mark is right on target here.  Over the past 30 years I have
directed my attention to gaining the cooperation of architects,
builders and board members to attempt to see as a goal a situation
where the less frequently the HVAC system goes on the better.
Buildings can be retrofitted to reduce heat gain in the summer and
to retain heat in the winter.  Now this is called "green" building,
but many conservators and archivists were aware of the problem and
methods to achieve "passive" systems instead of aggressive ones back
in the 70s and 80s. An article by Stehkamper, Hugo, "'Natural' air
conditioning of stacks," Restaurator, v. 9, 1988:163-177 gave a
clear definition of alternatives and many archives and document
repositories were built in Europe, especially Germany on "passive"
bases.  Nathan Stolow was an American pioneer in this effort and I
learned an incredible amount from his publications which are still
useful.  I published several papers on experiments I conducted with
Robert Futernick in the 70s and 80s trying to determine what the
tolerances of our storage and storage materials were.  The article
containing most of the results can be found in two publications:

    The Solander Box: its varieties and role as an archival unit of
    storage for prints and drawings in a museum, archive or gallery.
    Museum Management and Curator ship, v. 12, #4, 1993:387-400,
    reprinted in Archives et Bibliotheques de Belgique, v. 64,
    #1-4, 1993:259-384.

Another article looked at the history of archives and documents
focusing on those written on skins:

    Storage conditions and physical treatments relating to the
    dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Radiocarbon, v. 37, #1,
    1994:21-32.

The Bilbao Conference of the IIC had a number of papers from
conservators and architects reporting on buildings that either had
been retrofitted to reduce dependence on HVAC systems or new
buildings designed to do with less.  Some of these articles (in the
published papers of the Conference) cite studies showing that the
greatest damage to artifacts occurs when the HVAC systems fail.  Of
course, reference to Gary Thomson 's book, the Museum Environment,
can provide you with some interesting detail on that as well.

Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D.
Dept. of Anthropology
San Francisco State University


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 24:11
                  Distributed: Tuesday, August 3, 2010
                       Message Id: cdl-24-11-005
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