AIC's 42nd Annual Meeting

Wireless sensing technology has made real-time monitoring and management of a museum environment through assessment of the impact of humidity and temperature fluctuations, air pollution, and visitorship on art objects much more feasible. Combining real time analytics tools with high spatial and temporal density sensing, such a wireless platform can provide information over an extended period of time of the environmental fluctuations in the museum galleries. The results can be used to develop predictive models for optimal art preservation in response to the micro climatic conditions and may also useful to identify the most suitable locations for the display of sensitive art objects. The platform supports physical and statistical models to quantify and to correlate the short and long term responses of objects to environmental fluctuations. A description is provided of the sensing and modeling capabilities of IBM’s Low Power Mote platform, a system successfully installed at “The Cloisters”, New York’s medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the last two years, more than 2 million measurements across 5 galleries have been made monitoring changes in air quality, temperature, relative humidity, and visitor flow. Analytical models combined with real time data from sensors placed around art objects enables quantified three dimensional representations of gallery environmental conditions. In particular, an air quality analysis, derived from corrosion rates measured by a sensor array and correlated with outdoor conditions and concentrations of gaseous pollutants (SO2, ozone), will be presented, and a connection with the distinct geographical and operational conditions at The Cloisters will be proposed. In addition, the impact on temperature and humidity fluctuations due to visitorship in a selected gallery will be discussed.