Environmental Monitoring for Humanities and Audio-Visual Collections

FAIN: PG-51343-11

Amistad Research Center (New Orleans, LA 70118-5665)
Laura J. Thomson (Project Director: May 2010 to October 2012)

The purchase of preservation supplies and environmental monitoring equipment and the provision of specialized training to preserve the center's manuscript, rare book, fine art, and oral history collections chronicling the African American experience from the Civil War to the present. The collections include the papers of prominent artists and political leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ellis Marsalis, and works of art by Jacob Lawrence, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Romare Bearden.

The staff at the Amistad Research Center (ARC) has recently turned their attention to creating a physical storage environment more in line with prescribed professional archival standards. Based on recommendations made in a recent (2009) Conservation Assessment Program (CAP) report, this grant will allow Center staff to purchase envirnmental monitoring equipment in both of ARC’s storage facilities, to obtain training in implementing this monitoring system, to purchase preservation supplies to improve the storage conditions of the Center’s most vulnerable audiovisual materials, and to attend a workshop on improving the physical environment for archival storage. At the conclusion of this project, ARC staff will develop a plan for storage renovation based on the information from the workshop, the data from the data loggers, and the previous CAP report.