Passive environmental control for small cultural institutions in Australia

Colin Pearson and Steve King
pearson@scides.canberra.edu.au, stevek@unsw.edu.au

It is normally expected that museums, libraries, archives, cultural centres and keeping places, which house the nation's cultural heritage, will be air conditioned to ensure the long term preservation of their collections. However, air conditioning is expensive to install, operate and maintain, and if not working effectively for 24 hours each day, may often cause more damage to collections than no air conditioning. Therefore the challenge is how to provide a reasonably stable environment for cultural collections without the use of air conditioning. The use of passive environmental control offers a range of alternative methods. These are being investigated as part of an ongoing project to provide guidelines on the use of passive environmental control for small cultural institutions across Australia, on behalf of the Heritage Collections Council, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.