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Archived talk

Remarks by James Reilly to the Heritage Preservation Annual Meeting, Nov. 15, 2006

Metrics for Preservation Environments:
The Heritage Health Index’s Call to Action on Collection Environments

There is one sentence on page two of the summary report of the Heritage Health Index that is stark and clear:

The Heritage Health Index found that the most urgent preservation need at U.S. collecting institutions is environmental control.

Behind that assertion is a body of statistical evidence from the HHI itself and a great deal of recent scientific research that clarifies the effects of environment—for good or ill—and underscores its centrality to preservation and stewardship of collections.

Most of us don’t dispute the science or assert that climate is unimportant. And for most it comes as no surprise that many American institutions are not providing beneficial environments for their collections. Although there are places where environments are managed very well, I suspect that when the issue is raised, the majority of institutional leaders have an internal dialog that goes something like this:

It’s hopeless for us to meet the tight specifications for temperature and humidity that we’re supposed to maintain. We don’t have the money, the equipment, or the staff. Our utility bills are already straining the budget. We can’t contemplate major upgrades right now, and short of that, there’s nothing we can do.

Sound familiar? In my remarks today I’d like to deconstruct that internal dialog based on my experiences as a laboratory researcher for thirty years and from my observations on the front lines of field projects in major libraries and museums over the last decade. I’m here to offer some hope. The subject is complex and the benefits may vary, but it is far from hopeless, and might just end up being better for the collections of a library or museum and its energy bills.

Let’s start with the idea that “we’ll never meet tight specifications for temperature and humidity.” No, you likely won’t. So, what then? There’s something new that can help a lot: environmental metrics. With humidity and temperature targets, you’re either in range or out. If something isn’t right, it’s not easy to determine the nature of threat it presents, or how severe the danger is. Environmental metrics offer an alternative way to manage environments. They are calculated from temperature and humidity data using algorithms developed by IPI. Each of them measures a specific form of collection decay, including spontaneous chemical change in paper, plastics, and textiles (a.k.a. natural aging); mold risk; metal corrosion risk; and three types of physical risk: excessive dryness, excessive dampness, and dimensional change. Unlike targets, the metrics can quantify the risks―and benefits―posed by any set of conditions over any period of time. With metrics, genuine risk assessment and mitigation can be applied to environmental conditions.

The revolutionary aspect of metrics is that they allow for compromise, letting you pick the battles that really matter with your particular type of collection. Libraries and archives should concentrate the most on minimizing chemical change, because that is the underlying problem behind paper embrittlement, fading of photographs, loss of legibility in inks, red rot in leather, and a host of other major preservation challenges. The key to achieving chemical stability is being simultaneously cool and moderately dry. We have seen many libraries that spend money to actually make it worse for the books by unnecessary heating. For fine and decorative arts collections, moisture-related physical deterioration may be paramount, but one must also be aware of chemical and biological threats. Museums often forget that many of the organic materials in their collections need cool temperatures as well as appropriate relative humidities.

The hope I have to offer is based on the fact that whatever your climatic circumstances or mechanical systems (or lack thereof), there are probably several things you can do to help the collections and use less energy, and the metrics are the first step to finding out what those things may be. Managing environments using the metrics has been successful at the National Archives and Records Administration—they are the largest users of this approach. Other successes include three large projects, at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and more recently at the National Museum of Denmark. The project at the Library of Congress has gone on for more than seven years, first as a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and later with the library’s own funds. (Development of the metrics themselves as well as other IPI technology for environmental assessment was made possible by grants from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.) We have also worked with more than twenty smaller institutions, and we’ve found that the insights from environmental assessment using metrics are just as useful in smaller institutions as they are in larger libraries and museums.

Recalling the internal dialog mentioned above, I would like to dispel here and now the notion that it always requires unattainable money, staff, or equipment to improve environments. In our experience, the indispensable requirements are willingness to make the effort to understand the mechanical systems already in place; the ability to gather data and compute the metrics; and creation of a working forum where the collections staff, preservation staff, and facilities staff all work together on environmental issues with the blessing of upper management. It’s natural to think that new equipment is needed to make real progress (and sometimes it really is necessary). But even with new equipment, you still have to make it work. It is only logical to try and make what you have do as well as it can before concluding that large capital investments are called for.

Engineers think in projects and seldom have much to do with operating the systems they design. But our field experience tells us unequivocally that operating the equipment that institutions already have is the key not only to better collection environments but also to substantially reduced energy consumption. IPI has worked closely on all its field projects with Herzog/Wheeler & Associates, a Minnesota-based energy-efficiency consulting firm. Their commercial practice as well as their practice with cultural institutions shows that almost every large building could use 20% less energy and get the same or better collection environment simply by paying attention to operating variables. A single large air-handling unit (AHU) can waste $30,000 a year if no one ever asks, “What is this unit actually doing and what does it really need to do?” Consider that large institutions have many AHUs (the Madison building of the Library of Congress has more than 50) and the potential for significant energy savings in a large building like that is very real indeed.

But even beyond metrics and optimizing existing systems, there is hope for super-efficient storage buildings in the future. In Denmark we recently had the chance to tour two new purpose-built museum storage buildings that were built using advanced knowledge of collection requirements and building physics. In such buildings there is no premium on holding temperature steady (it varies slowly with the seasons) but the construction materials and mechanical equipment have been designed to provide steady humidity at the proper levels. These buildings sip energy because they have no cooling and minimal heating. They achieve outstanding performance in the environmental metrics by taking advantage of the natural climate, which offers relatively cool summers and mild winters. We are proud that IPI’s metrics and monitoring technology, including a new web-based interface for viewing environmental data, helped verify the success of such designs. The National Museum of Denmark is now planning large new facilities of its own patterned after these experiments.

The Heritage Health Index makes plain the urgency of doing a better job of managing storage and display conditions. My message is a simple one: If we care about the collections and the fiscal health of institutions, it’s time to answer the HHI’s call to action. An excellent place to start would be stepping forward with new ways to measure and manage environments and taking a hard look at how we use energy.