Invicta Protecting Our Heritage Museums
Friday 28th January, 2011
I’m sorry; we’ll have to go outside…
For over 50 years, residents of the Essex village of Little Baddow have been collecting together documents, photographs, maps and artefacts to create a unique record of the history of their village. Their collection is now housed in a purpose-built museum known as ‘The History Centre’, which provides space for exhibitions and a resource for those researching local and family history.
Knowing how easily UV light degrades and bleaches paper, cloth and other sensitive materials, they engaged Invicta Films to apply Museum grade UV protection film on all their windows. But, of course, they could not tell whether it was really effective in protecting their exhibits.
That was, until they arranged a seminar on the protection of archive material, to be held in the History Centre, along with representatives from four other local museums. Robert Entwistle, the Regional Conservation Officer for Outreach and within the museum services for Suffolk and Ipswich Museum, warned of the problems of fluctuating temperature and humidity and demonstrated instruments for measuring these, passing them round for his audience to try out. He then warned of the danger of UV light, and produced various meters for measuring it. He explained that a reading of 75 microwatts was acceptable for display purposes, but that it would be ideal to get it down to 40 microwatts.
Then he hit a problem. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not getting a reading at all in here,’ he said. ‘They’ve put UV protection film on their windows. We’ll have to go outside, if you’d like me to demonstrate these, at the end of this session.’
After the seminar, when asked if he could check levels again, he took a reading just inside the bay of a window, to get maximum light. He measured a UV level of just 3 microwatts – 1/25th of the acceptable level, and 1/13th of what he had described earlier as ideal for display purposes.
Treasures of the past are always vulnerable, whether in a museum or at home, but Little Baddow History Centre certainly has no regrets about installing UV protection.
Photo: A corner of one of the exhibitions in The History Centre.
For more information about The Little Baddow History Centre: www.thehistorycentre.org.uk