Please excuse cross-postings.

This posting is directed at cultural heritage institutions that were affected by recent Hurricane Sandy.

We have been studying the use of shutdowns and set-backs for creating sustainable preservation environments on a small scale in our lab and on a large scale with field trials in real institutions while teaching institutions how to figure out their own best sustainable environment for a few years.  In the process, we have developed a number of metrics and tools for measuring the impact of the environment on stored  materials.

Hurricane Sandy has opened an opportunity to study forced, longer-term shutdowns on the environments in cultural institutions and, in the bigger picture, may also produce a greater understanding of the costs of Sandy on collections beyond the immediate flood-damaged material.

As a result, we're currently collecting information from affected institutions. At the very least, we hope to gather some very basic and anecdotal information; at best, we hope to have the opportunity to examine environmental information from data loggers, building systems, and hygrothermographs during the affected period to see how institutions fared with regard to environmental changes.  The period is, of course, too short for some of our tools to be useful, but TWPI can be algebraically converted to say something like, "X days of Sandy without HVAC was equivalent to Y days under your normal conditions with regard to natural aging." Real data from the affected period can form a starting point to play-out "what if" scenarios as well.
We therefore feel that analysis of environmental data during this period will provide insights into sustainable environments that would not be possible using conservatively cautious controlled studies.

We would like to emphasize that this study is about the data and not about individual institutions. Actual Temperature and RH data would be useful, but beyond a general description of the type of institution and relative locations of monitoring equipment, no institutional identifiers will be used.

We appreciate your help with this study.

The short (should take less than three minutes) survey can be found at https://imagepermanenceinstitute.wufoo.com/forms/ipi-hurricane-sandy-shutdown-study/

Thank you.

-Doug
Douglas Nishimura
Image Permanence Institute
Rochester Institute of Technology
70 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623-5604
(585)-475-5727
(585)-475-7230 (fax)
(585)-475-5199 (general)
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http://ipisustainability.org/


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