I will be chairing a session at the New England Museum Association's annual meeting in Portland, ME on Friday, November 9.  It is entitled: Low-Tech Environmental Control: What’s Real, What’s Fantasy, What’s Achievable.  I will be presenting on environmental monitoring basics, various low-tech control options, and a few examples of successful implementation.  I am looking for 2-3 presenters who can share their own successes or failures in implementing low-tech environmental controls in a 5-minute or so presentation.  The session is technically in the form of a panel, so at the end you will also help answer audience questions as is appropriate. 

Low-tech is loosely defined as environmental control options that are simple, effective and inexpensive.  These include dehumidistatic control of heat, room-within-a-room construction, centralized dehumidification, envelope tightening procedures, and so forth that provide more stable relative humidity conditions for collections.  Please bring on your unconventional issues or solutions, including the good old sleuthing process to determine sources of problems!  Don't worry about being polished - this session is intended to discuss what's real, not ivory-tower.  And, failures also are sought, to help illustrate what does not work, or the difficulty in choosing effective options.  Ideally, you will have monitoring results before and after, or some other method of verifying improvement (or lack thereof).

In true museum conference fashion, your only reward will be fame, and the assistance you will provide to your museum colleagues!  Please email me off-list if you are interested.  Thanks so much!

Marc