Environmental Guidelines for Collections

The first attempt to summarize museum, library, and archive environmental requirements—and to show how they can be optimally provided for through a well-thought-out HVAC system—was found in the 1999 version of the handbook. It is the policy of ASHRAE to review and update information in each handbook, as it becomes appropriate; a three-year cycle is not uncommon for a new chapter.

The project had two components: the development of Chapter 20 through committee meetings and the drafting of Chapter 20. By design, the first version of Chapter 20 concentrated on temperature, relative humidity, and system selection, leaving gaseous and particulate air pollution filtration to be developed in later editions. The second iteration of Chapter 20—which was the focus of this project—sought to more effectively balance all environmental concerns, while making the overall structure easier to follow.

The first step in the development of the chapter was to derive a logical outline—comprehensible to engineers—that clearly described the fundamental requirements of the museum professional. Also important in the development phase was determining which committee member would become the chief author for each subsection.

Work completed included meetings among a subset of the team at the ASHRAE meeting in Dallas, Texas, in February 2000. Additionally, an open seminar at the second annual ASHRAE meeting of 2000, held in St. Paul, Minnesota, solicited information from engineers that the first version of Chapter 20 may have omitted or expressed unclearly. Authors were subsequently selected for each subsection of Chapter 20.

After a working outline was complete, each subsection was drafted by one of the committee experts. The full committee contained many more authoritative participants than authors. Because of this, drafts of subsections and of the entire chapter could be peer reviewed from within the committee membership without compromising quality.

One unique aspect of ASHRAE is its ability to fund and implement needed research. The completion of Chapter 20 was slow, in part, because of the need to identify areas where research was still lacking (if arguments for conducting this research are compelling, ASHRAE has the option of sponsoring it). Thus the process of drafting the chapter was more than a simple compilation; it was a proactive document of evolving knowledge and best practices.

The committee responsible for revision was selected because of its members’ recognized expertise in some or many areas of application. Publishing experts in hospital, microcircuit fabrication, or museum environments determined the committee composition for their particular chapters. For Chapter 20, this ensured a mixture of conservators, conservation scientists, academic research architects, industrial engineers and practicing museum, archive, and library HVAC engineers. The Conservation Institute's selection was based on its history of environmental research on air pollution and its preventive conservation philosophy.

Conservation Institute: James Druzik, Cecily Grzywacz