How temperature and relative humidity affect collection deterioration rates by Helen Alten Are you working in collection storage in a T-shirt or huddled and shivering with layers of clothes?
If you are comfortable, your collection may not be. Worse, it could be deteriorating. Temperature and relative humidity levels or fluctuations can be the biggest cause of environmental damage to a collection. Temperature is the outward manifestation of the amount of energy contained within an object. At higher temperature atoms and molecules move faster. Because they are moving faster, chemical reactions occur more quickly. Thus, higher temperature increases the rate of decay, a chemical reaction. For most materials, the rate of decay is unacceptably fast at temperatures humans find comfortable. Relative humidity (RH) governs the amount of moisture contained in materials at equilibrium with the environment. This is almost independent of temperature. As relative humidity changes, the object’s water content adjusts to the new relative humidity level, creating a new equilibrium. At higher RH, there is more water in objects. This occurs slowly, depending on the thickness and absorbency of
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