Speaker: Geert Bauwens, Managing Director, CHARP
Environmental monitoring sits at the heart of preventive conservation. Yet in practice, across museums, archives and heritage libraries, whether in storage or on display, it still too often relies on spreadsheets, spot checks, and time-consuming manual work.
At the same time, the context is changing. Collection care teams face growing pressure to balance strict environmental requirements for collections with the need to meet sustainability goals and reduce energy consumption.
The key parameters to monitor for sensitive collections are temperature, relative humidity, and light. But to truly support action, these need to be interpreted: mapped against conservation guidelines or transformed into meaningful indicators of degradation, such as absolute humidity, climate variability, and cumulative light exposure.
In this talk, we explore how environmental monitoring can move beyond data collection to actively support decision-making. Through real-life case studies, we demonstrate how intuitive, user-centred and collaborative monitoring approaches can simplify workflows and lead to more impactful action.
Geert Bauwens
