Sacred standards under attack!

For decades, it has been sacrosanct that the ideal conditions for museum collections are 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50% relative humidity. Conservators have had a more nuanced understanding, based on the actual materials in a particular artifact, but even for them stability at the desired settings is considered vital to long-term survival of museum artifacts.

Not so much anymore.

While it is still a touchy subject (see the footnote to the attached article), museum directors and conservators are beginning to let things fluctuate a little in the name of saving the environment. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to maintain precise humidity levels and studies have consistently shown that gradual changes in humidity do not damage artifacts.

No less a director than Sir Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate galleries is chiming in:

Standards under attack!"We need to devise imaginative new solutions to resolve the dichotomy between long-term collections care and expensive environmental conditions,"

Read more in the Guardian.

New approaches to humidity control emerging

The NY Times today has an interesting piece on some new thinking about the role of humidity control in conservation. While they don't go so far as to say 70/50 is dead, there appear to be some new approaches, the simplest being to use more humidity controlled cases and the most interesting being a move towards "smart ventilation," which is essentially going back to how it used to be done before we had elaborate, and now increasingly expensive, HVAC systems. Rediscovering these inexpensive and effective strategies, oddly enough, appears to be the real challenge.

Of course, museums with limited budgets have been finding ways to keep humidity stable for years (fluctuations cause the most damage to sensitive artifacts), the simplest being to seal the space to prevent atmospheric changes from immediately affecting the storage area.


Update:  Here are several other interesting discussions:

The Nothern States Conservation Center on Relative Humidity and Temperature


A piece posted by the National Archives by the father of this discussion, Ernest Conrad: The Realistic Preservation Environment

And here is a good, if technical, discussion of the challenge of Humidity Control in the Humid South.