Innovative monitoring campaign of the environmental conditions of the Stibbert museum in Florence

Abstract

Conservation of ancient metallic artefact displayed inside museums is a complex problem due to the large number of constraints mainly related to the artefacts fruition by people. The development of a simple procedure for monitoring the artefact conservation state promptly highlighting risky conditions without impacting on the normal museum operations could be of interest in the cultural heritage world. This paper describes the interesting results obtained by using a highly sensitive and innovative methodology for evaluating the safety level of the museum indoor areas, and more specifically of the interior of the showcases, with respect to the metallic artefacts. The methodology is based on the use of an innovative smart sensors network and of copper reference samples. The smart sensors network was employed for the continuous monitoring of temperature and relative humidity close to the artefacts, i.e. inside the display showcases. The reference specimens were Cu coated with a 100 nm Cu nanostructured layer put for 1 year in the exhibition rooms inside and outside the showcases and characterised by means of normal imaging, colorimetric and FESEM techniques at regular intervals. The results of the monitoring activity evidenced the higher reactivity to the environmental aggressivity of the nanocoated copper specimen with respect to bulk artefacts and therefore the possibility to use them as alerts to possible corrosion phenomena that may occur to the real artefacts. A proper temperature and relative humidity monitoring inside the showcases and close to each group of artefacts is a powerful though economic and non-invasive way to highlight most of the possible critical display conditions.

Laser cleaning of Cu-based artefacts: laser/corrosion products interaction

“…The Cultural Heritage field is deeply related to metrological issues because measurements are involved in the characterisation and conservation of the artefacts and in the evaluation of the aggressiveness of the environment, which surrounds them [1][2][3]. Tangible Cultural Heritage is a fundamental witness of mankind history and has to be preserved for future generations, in all its multimateric assets, starting from proper cleaning procedures, to restoration and conservation in controlled environments.…”

An Adaptive Colour Calibration for Crowdsourced Images in Heritage Preservation Science

“…In the current times there has been some research with successful experiments involving crowdsourced information destined to help preservation [5], especially regarding control and surveillance [20]. This means that, rather that doing traditional preventive maintenance, having a supply of information coming from third parties helps having a constant knowledge of the status of a heritage piece; this can lead to discarding worries and preventive maintenance resources in favour of knowing the moment of repairing.…”

“…Mainly, the considered research works employ crowdsourced data from cellphones of third-party users as supply for the control task [10] [30]. There, they assess that taking pictures of the visitors to a heritage piece and extracting colorimetric information after performing some needed preprocesses is a satisfactory manner of evaluating the status of a monitored object, while being a non-invasive approach at the same time [20]. They also state the importance of CIELAB colorimetric information for their purposes and the observation of employing simple, minimal calibration processes [19].…”

“…Our work proposes adaptive operations of global calibration that aim to improve the performance by homogenising any set of crowdsourced pictures acquired of a defined display, consisting of a colour checkerboard and indicating material tags, located next to the heritage piece under observation in a controlled lighting environment. In a similar context to [20], the ending color coordinates of the material tags in CIELAB are then extracted as a means of obtaining their chromatic information. We base the evaluation of the quality of our results on the measures of recent works of analogous approach like [10] and [21], and our results show that our approach improves the stability and quality of the information for future real applications.…”

Validation of a low-cost wireless sensors node for museum environmental monitoring

“…E. Angelini et al [29] proposed a Smart sensors board for microclimate monitoring; Corbellini et al [30] introduced a sensor network architecture developed for museum monitoring and F. Diego et Al. [31] propose a sensor network architecture to read physical parameters in the cultural heritage field.…”