Risk assessment in the field of museum resource management: Objects preventive conservation approach

Abstract

Cultural heritage and properties in collections are the most important organizational resources of museums, which can be deteriorated under improper environmental conditions. Identifying the climate deteriorating agents, and assessing and prioritizing their risk levels are among the most recent issues studied by museum conservators and researchers. Creating risk management programs leads to enhancing service life of cultural properties. Temperature and relative humidity are two important factors related directly to objects permanence; Thus, using methods which combine and quantify the conservation effects of temperature and relative humidity, could yield to useful and reliable insights for proposition of effective preventive conservation solutions. This research tries to explain the role and importance of risk management programs in the museums-as one of the main pillars of the country & apos; s cultural heritage; therefore, by using a multidisciplinary approach and existing experiments, proposes a method to examine and assess risks of temperature and relative humidity on museum objects. Such quantitative analysis could help estimate objects & apos; service life and provide solutions in order to enhance it. In order to examine the proposed research method, temperature and relative humidity data were gathered from textile storage room of the Cultural Institute of Bonyad Museums in a period of 18 months.