UIL Preservation department PEM Climate Notebook Field Trial Beginning this March the Preservation department will participate in the PEM Climate Notebook field trial. This project involves beta testing of a next generation of software for management of environmental data recorded in collection storage areas. Both the software and instrumentation have been produced at the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology. Of particular note is the capability of the software to calculate both a PI (preservation index) and TWPI (time weighted preservation index). The PI is a result in years that projects useful life expectancy for given collections under specific conditions of temperature and relative humidity. The TWPI projects a useful life expectancy that also factors in variations recorded at a given storage location.

Our part in the project will be to learn, utilize and evaluate the Climate Notebook software as we monitor two PEMs (Preservation Environment Monitors), one on station in our Special Collections third floor stacks and another in Special Collections basement storage.

The 18 month PEM Climate Notebook field trial program has approximately 180 participating institutions. These institutions vary widely and maintain every type of stored collections. The overall effort will result in the first comparative survey of collection storage conditions collected via equivalent digital recording and reporting methods and compiled to a single database for further analysis. Resulting findings, reflecting national storage conditions, will be published on the internet.