English Heritage (officially the English Heritage Trust) is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses. The charity states that it uses these properties to "bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year". Within its portfolio are Stonehenge, Dover Castle, Tintagel Castle and the best preserved parts of Hadrian's Wall. English Heritage also manages the London Blue Plaque scheme, which links influential historical figures to particular buildings. When originally formed in 1983, English Heritage was the operating name of an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government, officially titled the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, that ran the national system of heritage protection and managed a range of historic properties. It was created to combine the roles of existing bodies that had emerged from a long period of state involvement in heritage protection. In 1999 the organisation merged with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and the National Monuments Record, bringing together resources for the identification and survey of England's historic environment.On 1 April 2015, English Heritage was divided into two parts: Historic England, which inherited the statutory and protection functions of the old organisation, and the new English Heritage Trust, a charity that would operate the historic properties, and which took on the English Heritage operating name and logo. The British government gave the new charity an £80 million grant to help establish it as an independent trust, although the historic properties remained in the ownership of the state.
A relative humidity (RH) of 30–40% was considered optimal for the ‘sick’ glasses of the Veste Coburg Art Collections to prevent further corrosion at higher humidity values and crizzling on drying of the gel layer at lower levels. This has been achieved since 1993 by using saturated solutions of magnesium chloride in display cases, providing a constant humidity of 33%. These solutions also absorb volatile harmful ‘carbonyl’ and other pollutants. A visual survey of the glasses and recent ion chromatographic measurements of alkalis on their surfaces confirmed their stable condition after three decades: no crystals, no new haze, no tears, no fragmentation, and no further growth of crizzling.
Silver tarnish is a major issue in many heritage institutions. Applying lacquer is frequently used when preventive conservation approaches are limited. The service lifetime of the lacquer has a strong impact on resources and sustainability. Little systematic work has been published on this. This work explores three thresholds on lifetime—visual, reversibility, and loss of protection. It uses thermodynamic modelling to predict lacquer lifetime from aging at four temperatures. Samples on sterling silver with Frigilene lacquer were used and aging was assessed with a Bruker Alpha FTIR using external reflectance. The FTIR ratio of produced carbonyl peak to nitrate peaks was used to quantify the aging. The commonly used C-O-C peak was found to suffer from dispersion in a high proportion of samples, so could not be used in this study. The results were compared with measurements of lacquer on silver objects displayed in showcases and from store (with almost no light exposure). Spectra were obtained with the Bruker Alpha or an Inspect infra-red microscope. Autocatalytic effects through concentration of emitted nitrogen oxide gases have also been explored using diffusion tubes and gas ingress analysis. No significant concentration was observed. The thresholds were clearly established, and the model produced similar results to the natural aging studied.
Historical buildings are prone to deterioration due to moisture and salt activity. Salt weathering affects the appearance of monuments, resulting in mechanical degradation. Many laboratory-based studies have been performed focusing on understanding salt formation in building materials and the resulting damage mechanisms. However, large-scale in situ monitoring is necessary to understand salt activity in realistic situations. Here, we present a novel methodology for in situ and noninvasive identification and monitoring of moisture and salts, following a complementary remote sensing approach. The study is based on ground-based remote short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral imaging and remote Raman spectroscopy at stand-off distances of order 10 m. SWIR spectral imaging was used for scanning large wall surfaces at high resolutions (angular resolution of 45 μrad), which gave spatial distributions of moisture and salts in their various hydration states, visualized using an artificial neural-network based spectral clustering method. Remote Raman spectroscopy in each cluster area confirmed the identification of the salts.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has one of the world's largest museum environmental monitoring systems. Over the last 10 years, this system has collected data from over 500 sensors across several sites. This data has been processed, analysed and communicated using data science tools from R and RStudio. These tools have saved hours of data processing time, increased engagement with key stakeholders, and ensured the safety of the collections. This paper explores how these data science tools fit into the V&A's strategy for collections management. This paper will also introduce some methods of transforming, modelling, and translating environmental data into insights that can be communicated to museum stakeholders.
