Museums are often designed with environmental concerns at the forefront, but few architects are trained to consider the impact of highly reflective flooring on artworks, and interior designers aren’t often working with casework vendors to ensure environmental sensors tracking relative humidity are built into cabinetry when creating custom displays for vintage toy collections.
For private collectors, the boundary between stewardship and convenience is often defined by distance. As collections move beyond purposefully built institutions and carefully managed galleries into lived-in spaces, the ability to maintain stable environmental conditions becomes more complex. Temperature and relative humidity, once easily controlled, now fluctuate alongside daily life.
When you open your doors to a cool spring breeze or crack windows on a sweltering summer day, you aren’t the only one experiencing the weather–so is your collection. The question is no longer whether to monitor these conditions, but how to do so continuously, seamlessly, and remotely.
The Environmental Sensors & Environmental Data tab in Collector Systems allows you to monitor and measure the conditions surrounding your collection from anywhere. If you’re at your London flat and see a notification about wildfires nearing your Los Angeles home, you can quickly pull up your sensor data to ensure your HVAC system is properly cooling your home and protecting your collection.
Users can create sensor records, define details for each sensor, set maximum and minimum thresholds for temperature and humidity, and link specific objects to each sensor. Our new integration with Conserv makes all of this seamless–their long-range wireless sensors can be associated with objects in your collection, and all data is carefully monitored in the tabs.
Simple to deploy, Conserv’s sensors do not require WiFi and can be installed in even the most challenging collections environments, like basement vaults and thick stone walls. Once Conserv sensors have been installed and integrated with our system, environmental data–including temperature, humidity, dewpoint, illuminance, and ultraviolet levels–can be entered manually or logged automatically. From there, it’s easy to populate interactive tracking graphs and reports, making monitoring easy and intuitive.
Not only can you analyze the interior environment, but Conserv also provides data tracking external weather data–so you can easily understand why fluctuations might have occurred. By looking at patterns in the data, like spikes in relative humidity after every summer shower, you can potentially identify points of concern, like imperfectly sealed windows or an aging HVAC system.
Reports can be easily shared with curators, registrars, conservators, and insurance agents to keep everyone informed about the collection’s environment. The graphs and data visualizations are not only easy to understand but can also serve as tools for museums and galleries to share environmental data with stakeholders, such as board members, lending institutions, and potential object donors.
If any sensor records values outside your defined thresholds, the Collector Systems and Conserv integration can send push notifications, so your team can respond proactively, minimizing risk to the collection. Say hail breaks a skylight in your gallery after hours–our system can alert you to a spike in relative humidity, facilitating quick removal of works to a more stable environment.
Collector System’s environmental-monitoring system is everything you need to responsibly steward your collection, all in one place. With our Conserv integration, there is no need to manage different data in different places. You don’t need to download, upload, and share a complex environmental report from a third-party–all the data you need is readily available in the Environmental tab. Take the hassle out of monitoring your collection’s environment by creating a unified data ecosystem from the tools you already use.
