Mr. Hosley, I would suggest
https://www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org/resources/videos/effect-humidity-rare-book for example, to see why HVAC is a good thing to have for the protection of collection materials.
Last year I had an institution in a Gulf coast state call and mention that they had experienced HVAC failure during January a year or so earlier and they had
books “jumping” off of shelves. Given that they didn’t stuff books tightly on the shelves and the shrinking covers trying to open, jumping would indeed be the result as RH dropped. Tightly packed, the covers, likely at the spine, would’ve have failed.
In addition, we have learned that with regard to chemical deterioration of materials in the dark, periods of bad storage conditions count for more than the periods
of great storage. If you have an object stored at some condition that would give it 10 years of life before reaching some agreed upon endpoint for half its life and another condition that would give it 1000 years of life before reaching some agreed upon endpoint
for the other half of its life, you would find that the maximum life that you would get out of the object would be 19.8 years to reach the agreed upon endpoint.
Mr. Harvey is correct and the first 20 years or so of my career were spent studying the effects of storage environment on mainly archival materials. That taught
me that storage conditions are critical to the survival of materials in collections. More than ten years farther down the road, we’re satisfied that there are no substitutes for a good storage environment and now we’re trying to figure out how to achieve
it at minimal cost.
Respectfully,
-Doug
Douglas Nishimura
Image Permanence Institute
Rochester Institute of Technology
70 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623-5604
1+(585)-475-5727
1+(585)-475-7230 (fax)
1+(585)-475-5199 (general)
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www.imagepermanenceinstitute.org
HVAC is a hugely unnecessary expense
Bill Hosley
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