Tenement Museum Collections Environmental Monitoring

FAIN: PG-51292-11

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Inc. (New York, NY 10002-3102)
Derya Golpinar (Project Director: May 2010 to July 2012)
Dana Friedman (Project Director: July 2012 to March 2014)

The purchase of environmental monitoring equipment recommended by a preservation consultant and the recalibration of existing equipment in order to monitor temperature, relative humidity, and vibration in a storage area housing a collection of 9,000 objects, 5,000 photographs, and 140 linear feet of archival records. The corpus documents migration history in a location that housed more than 7,000 immigrants from 20 nations between 1863 and 1935, and it is one of the few in the nation to offer information about the material culture of the urban working class and poor during this period.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum requests a grant of $5,905 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to enhance the environmental monitoring of its unique collections and begin examining how vibrations affect its collections. If awarded a grant, the Museum will purchase new environmental monitoring equipment, including climate and vibration dataloggers, recalibrate its existing climate dataloggers that are currently ineffective, and hire a consultant to implement a vibration monitoring program and train museum staff on the use of the equipment and how to interpret the data collected.