Teaching Sustainable Collection Care

Teaching sustainable collections maintenance to graduate students in conservation as well as students in museum, library, and archives preservation is challenging. Students enter school with an exposure to preventive care, but are surprisingly unfamiliar with prescriptive ideas about requirements for temperature and relative humidity for collections, and therefore do not need to unlearn former rigid climate standards enforced in many institutions. Central to graduate conservation education is an understanding of the environmental responses of individual materials, and the contributions of climate mitigation to preservation. While there are some case studies, such as those reviewed in this paper, in which museums and libraries have achieved energy savings while maintaining collections preservation, further studies illustrating building and collection performance and energy savings, taken together, would aid both graduate instruction and preventive practice.For the first time in a class on sustainable collections maintenance at UCLA, graduate students monitored both the climate and the energy expenditures in a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified building housing a library collection. Both the architect and the engineer who shepherded the LEED process participated in course instruction. The students used an energy modeling calculator to measure the energy currently used to maintain indoor conditions, and compared this with energy needed to maintain stringent standards of 20 degrees C and 45% RH year round. Calculating building energy data alongside environmental data teaches students about the complexity of crafting sustainable recommendations. It further pinpoints the importance of long-term collaborative work in the creation of sustainable preservation climates.