Preserving Invaluable Museum Research & Collections
Just as important as everything that museums collect and study is the way those important assets are preserved. From cultural artifacts and specimens to works of art, temperature and humidity fluctuations can alter materials within these collections and cause the objects to deteriorate without swift action.
To this end, Tim White — the director of collections and research at one of the oldest and largest natural history museums — sought to automate the museum’s temperature and humidity monitoring. “In the museum world, we’ve looked at a lot of hardware and standalone solutions for data logging,” White noted. “I’ve had a person go around once a month and download information from data loggers, but this made it difficult to catch issues as they were occurring.”
Having heard about CORIS from one of his colleagues, White first found a use for the CORIS system in monitoring LN2 and ultra-low-temperature freezers, and then for monitoring the museum environment and assets during an extensive renovation project.