Carmarthenshire County Council
Customer Challenge
Carmarthenshire, often known as the “Garden of Wales”, is home to a number of museums that celebrate the rich cultural history of the region. These include Carmarthenshire County Museum in the town of Carmarthen, Parc Howard Museum, Kidwelly Industrial Museum, the Museum of Land Speed, and the Dylan Thomas Boathouse.
Across these sites visitors can explore a wide range of artefacts and collections, from costume collections and fine art at the county museum, to ceramics at Parc Howard, and personal items belonging to Dylan Thomas at his boathouse.
While these collections provide an important cultural resource for the region, they also require careful protection. With artefacts spread across five different sites, the challenge for the council is ensuring that environmental conditions remain suitable for preserving a wide variety of historic objects.
Why
Joanna Cook, conservation officer with Carmarthenshire County Council, is responsible for helping to care for collections across all five museum sites. The variety of artefacts and the number of locations make conservation management a complex task.
Environmental conditions can significantly affect the preservation of artefacts. Extreme temperatures can cause thermal shock, with objects expanding in heat and contracting in colder conditions. Composite objects expand and contract at different rates, which can lead to cracking.
Humidity presents additional risks. When combined with higher temperatures it can accelerate mould growth, while cold conditions can cause condensation to form on metal objects. The local climate adds further challenges, as Carmarthenshire experiences very humid summers and several of the museum sites are located close to the coast where they are exposed to wet and salty air.
Certain materials are particularly vulnerable. Textiles, such as the costume collection at Carmarthenshire County Museum, are especially sensitive to fluctuations in humidity. If conditions are too dry the materials may crack, while excessive moisture increases the risk of mould growth.
Alongside preserving artefacts, environmental management must also consider the comfort of visitors and staff. Achieving the correct balance between conservation conditions and visitor comfort is an important part of managing the museum environments.
The Eltek Solution
To help manage environmental conditions across multiple sites, Carmarthenshire County Council installed monitoring systems from Eltek.
Currently Carmarthenshire County Museum, Parc Howard Museum, and the Dylan Thomas Boathouse all use Eltek monitoring equipment. In total, more than fifty GD10 and SRV250 data loggers operate across the three sites.
Because the museums are spread across different locations, the council required a system that could combine monitoring across sites into one platform. The Eltek system allows these installations to be integrated, making it possible to review environmental data across several buildings from a single system.
This capability has significantly improved efficiency for the conservation team. By accessing data remotely, Joanna can monitor conditions across multiple sites without the need to travel between them.
The system software also provides tools for analysing environmental data. By overlaying graphs from different locations, it is possible to identify patterns across sites or detect issues specific to one building, such as a leak or abnormal humidity levels.
Measurable Results
Using the Eltek monitoring system, environmental conditions across the museum sites can now be monitored efficiently from a single platform.
The ability to combine systems across multiple buildings has significantly reduced the time required to review environmental conditions.
As Joanna explains:
“To have everything on the same system makes everything easy. It saves a lot of travel time, now I can do it all in one hour.”
The data analysis features also provide valuable insight into environmental trends across the sites.
“Overlaying the graphs is very helpful. You can see trends over sites or whether there is something specific to one site, like a leak.”
Strategic Impact
Looking ahead, Carmarthenshire County Council plans to continue expanding its environmental monitoring as new projects are completed across the museum sites.
Recent building work has included the construction of new roofs and new archive spaces, and there is potential to extend monitoring to additional locations such as the Industrial Museum and the Museum of Land Speed.
The ability to easily install and integrate new monitoring equipment makes it possible for the council to expand its environmental monitoring as conservation needs evolve.
Alongside support from D Tech, the Eltek monitoring system helps ensure that important collections across multiple museum sites remain protected.
With ongoing conservation work, preparation of historic collections, new exhibitions being introduced, and the reopening of museums to visitors, the collections of Carmarthenshire will continue to be preserved and presented to the public under carefully monitored conditions.
