Collection Care
Innovative and affordable service for the Preventive Conservation monitoring of individual Cultural Artefacts during display, storage, handling and transport
The degradation of an artefact depends on the environmental conditions to which it is exposed, such as temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), light (L), air pollutants (AP) -either gases such as NO2 (nitrogen oxides), SO2 (sulphur dioxide), O3 (ozone) and particulate matter- vibrations (V) and their synergies.
Cultural artefacts gradually adapt to the environment over time if it is maintained constant, however their degradation rate increases considerable when being exposed to short-term or seasonal environmental conditions (fatigue behaviour), being the effects on an artefact cumulative in time. These changing environmental conditions are often the result of moving artworks between exhibitions, from exhibitions to storage and vice versa or during transport for institutional loans for temporary exhibitions.
In addition, cultural artefacts can be made of wood, metal, textile, canvas, paper, ceramic, stone or glass among others, and a large number of these are made with a combination of this different materials. Since each material has a specific reactive behaviour as a function of environmental-induced stresses and degradation kinetics, there is a vast heterogeneity in terms of physical and material behaviour of artefacts.
Therefore, for an effective PC of cultural artefacts it is essential to consider the historic environmental stress and degradation kinetics of their different materials (and their synergies) and monitor the artefact at all times. However, due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the material nature of the artefacts, this requires expensive monitoring and control equipment as well as specialized personnel, out of reach for most, small to medium sized museums and collections.
The CollectionCare project, a European Commission’s Horizon 2020 funded project, aims to develop an innovative PC decision support system targeting the needs of small-medium sized museums and collections. It will integrate current research and technological advances in monitoring systems (sensor nodes), wireless communications, big data, cloud computing and material and multi-material degradation models into a single affordable system. In this way, the CollectionCare system will be able to monitor the environmental conditions of each artefact individually at any place (at display, storage, handling or transport) provide degradation predictions of multi-material cultural artefacts and offer the adequate recommendations for their good conservation.
To start, the CollectionCare system will monitor the environmental conditions with a low-cost wireless sensor node that will be attached strategically in the room, or on or nearby the cultural artefact.
The Data collected by the sensors will be transmitted to a cloud computing platform for Big Data using LPWAN technologies.
Then, the recorded data will be automatically stored, analyzed and crossed in the cloud with advanced multi-material degradation models as well as with the parameters of European Standards and Guidelines standards to evaluate those data.
Later, CollectionCare system will provide degradation predictions of multi-material cultural artefacts, alarms and adequate recommendations of preventive conservation to control and minimize their degradation thus ensuring their preservation. This can be visualized through the Web Browser of CollectionCare management software.
In this way, CollectionCare will provide an affordable, adaptable and versatile solution for the preventive conservation of movable artwork, targeting the needs of stakeholders such as: small-medium sized museums, art galleries, libraries, archives, private collections, transport, storage and handling companies, art management software companies and insurance companies specialized in art.
The CollectionCare System
CollectionCare specific objectives:
Development of a low-cost, low-power, real–time system
Optimization of current air pollution sensoring system to a miniaturized and real-time wireless sensoring node.
Development of a gateway device
Optimization of wireless communication systems
Development of a cloud-based architecture of big-data system
Integration and tailoring of the existing degradation models
Integration of the different components developed with above specific objectives into the CollectionCare system, and demonstrating it as a service in museums
As partner CollectionCare, KMKG act as a test facility and is involved in project communication.
Website
www.collectioncare.eu