Establish an environmental monitoring program.

FAIN: PG-280866-21

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Fayetteville, AR 72701-1201)
Mary C. Suter (Project Director: January 2021 to April 2025)

The University of Arkansas Museum’s purchase of data loggers to monitor the environment in its collection spaces. The humanities collections are used for off-site exhibits, loans to other institutions, research, popular and scholarly publications, public programming, and the museum’s website and social media accounts. Following on a previous Collections Assessment for Preservation report, the museum has prioritized addressing the deficiencies of the HVAC system, first through the purchase of monitoring devices. This project would focus on archaeology, ethnology, and history collections. Of these objects, 55,829 are from Arkansas. The museum holds the largest collection of Native American artifacts from Arkansas anywhere in the world, and operates in compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The project is to establish an environmental monitoring program, under the guidance of a museum environmental specialist, using temperature, relative humidity, and light data loggers and eClimateNotebook software to assess the performance of the heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems for the University Museum’s collections, processing, and documents storage spaces.