Assessment and monitoring the environment of cultural property (AMECP Project)

Abstract

Damage to cultural property in museums, libraries and historic buildings is caused by environmental pollution. Up to now environmental control for indoor cultural property was not a routine method due to high costs and the highly sophisticated equipment needed for the examination of environments. Therefore within this Europian Commission funded project it was the aim to develop a glass based sensor to facilitate the assessment of environments. The quantitative and qualitative characterisation of various environments (pollution profiles of SO2, NO2, volatile organic compounds, formaldehyde and organic acids parallel to temperature and humidity recording) in Northern, Southern and Central Europe provided the necessary background for the glass sensor development and resulted in a complementary picture of the distribution of environmental pollution in these parts of Europe. The results from the assessment and monitoring programme of the three different locations (Germany, Portugal and Grea t Britain) each with five sites demonstrate clearly the high potential of the glass sensor method to evaluate different environments. The easy to handle method is suitable to act as an early warning device for highly corrosive environments enabling minimalisation of interactive conservation work which will have significant cost savings