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Evaluation of the indoor environment in a historic museum during the COVID-19 lockdown in Northwest England

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posted on 2024-10-04, 15:36 authored by Sura Al-MaiyahSura Al-Maiyah, D Brett Martinson, Hisham Elkadi

Monitoring the quality of the indoor environment is a practice commonly adopted by museums as part of operational risk management. Recorded environmental data are often used to assess the safety of the indoor environment for artefacts, and their suitability for visitors’ comfort. Previous studies reported indictive or extended monitoring campaigns assessing the performance of museums and their level of compliance with regulatory standards. These analyses were typically conducted in normal circumstances assessing indoor microclimate quality under normal operating procedures. Museum closures during the 2020 pandemic and the global lockdown measures, introduced by governments, presented the heritage sector with an unprecedented situation with empty galleries where collections, in several museums, were held ‘dormant’ in free-running environments. Assessing the indoor environment in such exceptional circumstances offers a unique insight into the performance of these heritage repositories in other unpredicted situations and potential opportunities for microclimate optimization. This paper investigates the results of extended pre and post-pandemic monitoring that was performed in a historic museum in Northwest England. The findings contribute to the ongoing universal debate to lessen the standardised strict environmental guidelines and the shift toward more contextualized standards in museums in the face of the increasing decline in heritage funding. This would also affect museums’ targets to reduce energy and resources required to maintain the current environmental guidelines and achieve their aim to reduce their carbon footprint.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Building Research and Information

Volume

52

Issue

7

Pages

748-764

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Acceptance date

2024-03-25

Publication date

2024-04-27

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0961-3218

eISSN

1466-4321

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Sura Al-Maiyah. Deposit date: 1 April 2024

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