Museums and collection storage spaces are famously energy intensive. To preserve artifacts, they often rely on strict, round-the-clock setpoints for temperature, relative humidity, and light.
Across large buildings and multiple collections, those standards come with a steep energy cost—putting institutions in a constant tradeoff between sustainability goals and preservation needs.
Yale’s Environmental Monitoring Data Project is taking on that challenge by uniting conservators and collection specialists with IT experts and Facilities staff to improve how environmental monitoring information is gathered, shared, and put to work. Led by the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH) in partnership with Yale’s Cultural Heritage IT, the effort brings together teams from Yale Library, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale Peabody Museum, with support from central ITS.
Launched in summer 2023, the project has two primary aims: evaluate current monitoring practices to harmonize approaches and establish best practices; and build a shared data pipeline that aggregates information across collections so it can be accessed, shared, and analyzed more easily.
In this video, Christine McCarthy—associate director of IPCH and director of preservation and conservation at Yale Library—describes how better data can support smarter decisions that reduce energy use while continuing to safeguard Yale’s collections for generations to come.