“The thermal environment in representative areas of the Shelton-McMurphey-Johnson house does not meet temperature and relative humidity standards for the display and storage of historic furniture and artifacts.”

As noted in the Standards section, there is no universally accepted set of standards for a historic house museum environment. In fact, there are a variety of sometimes contradictory recommended guidelines. For the purpose of this experiment, a representative set of guidelines was chosen based on the sample of guidelines investigated. These are:

• Temperature: 65^oF – 75 ^oF
• Relative humidity: 40%RH - 60% RH

Data Collection

Data was collected over two time periods, from 11/6/2002 to 11/9/2002, and from 11/16/2002 to 11/20/2002. Five “Hobo” data loggers were set to collect temperature and relative humidity readings at five-minute intervals, and placed in the following locations in the SMJ House:

The data was downloaded from the Hobo data loggers and imported into an Excel spreadsheet. It was compared to the operating standards to determine how well it supported the hypothesis. As the data loggers were set to collect two types of data (temperature and relative humidity), these results will be discussed separately.