Preventive conservation
Collections do not look after themselves.
Climate, light, air and pests do more damage over a decade than any single incident. This is what can be measured against them, with which instruments, and how to tell whether a measurement is worth anything.
Start here
The four questions that come first
Which data logger?
Accuracy, memory depth, readout. Where a logger fails in collection spaces.
Which humidity?
Why the rigid 50 percent rule is outdated and what replaced it.
How much light?
Lux times hours. How to budget a year instead of just dimming.
Are there pests?
Placing sticky traps, reading them, and interpreting what turns up.
Topics
Where the damage comes from
Each area has an overview plus the concrete equipment and material questions that actually come up in practice.
Preventive conservation
The whole field in one page: the ten agents of deterioration, which of them you can actually measure, and a defensible order to work through them.
Climate monitoring
Choosing loggers, placing sensors where they tell the truth, keeping them calibrated, and reading a year of data without fooling yourself.
Humidity control
The range to aim for, the equipment that holds it, and the case for treating one showcase instead of one building.
Light and UV
Fading is spent permanently. How to measure it, how to filter it, and how to budget a year of display rather than dimming by feel.
Air quality
The damage that comes out of the storage furniture rather than in through the window, and how to find it before the object does.
Pest management
Traps first, identification second, treatment last. The cheapest monitoring in preventive conservation and the fastest damage if you skip it.
Storage and display
Objects spend most of their existence in a box on a shelf. Getting the box and the shelf right outweighs almost everything else you can buy.
Materials
Wood wants stable humidity, metal wants it low, photographs want it cold. What each material needs and how to handle a mixed store where those needs conflict.
Journal
Longer pieces on the places where the standard advice runs into a real building, a real budget or a contested piece of evidence.
Equipment
Instruments and consumables
Buying links go here once the partner programmes are in place. Until then, every guide states the selection criteria an offer has to stand up to.
Journal
Recently written
The cost of a number
How a working assumption became a specification, what it cost, and what the revision means for a museum that cannot afford plant either way.
Where the first budget goes
A spending order for a collection starting from nothing, ranked by how fast the damage happens rather than by what is easiest to order.
The sealed case paradox
The same seal that lets a case hold humidity also concentrates whatever the case is emitting. Improving one worsens the other.
How this site works
Sensmat is an independent reference site. We do not hold a collection, we do not sell instruments, and we run no laboratory measurements of our own. What is written here rests on published standards, manufacturer specifications and the conservation literature. Where a figure is contested, it says so.