Museum & Heritage Case study
Protecting the Book of Kells in the Long Room
With a quarter of a million books and a million visitors a year, preserving the Old Library’s collection is an unenviable job. Chief Conservator Dr John Gillis chose Eltek for product performance, easy software and responsive support, and found the cloud a “real game changer”.
1592
University founded
65 m
Long Room chamber
~250k
Books & manuscripts
1M
Visitors a year
A leaky, historic building
Founded in 1592, Trinity College Dublin is Ireland’s oldest surviving university. Running through its Old Library is the Long Room, a 65-metre chamber holding the library’s oldest books and its most prized possession, the Book of Kells.
The library sits in the centre of Dublin and is, in Dr Gillis’s words, “an historic but leaky building, so air quality can be a problem.” Poor air quality and high relative humidity drive Red Rot, irreversible damage to leather bindings, so temperature, humidity and light all have to be watched closely.
Micro-climates and a coming refurbishment
With help from D-Tech, Dr Gillis specified GC10 and CB70 transmitters to measure temperature, relative humidity and visible and ultraviolet light, placed at strategic intervals through the Long Room and its display cases, a large, old room with several distinct micro-climates. With an upcoming Long Room refurbishment, the collection’s temporary home will need monitoring too, and the same Darca software works with any transmitter added later.
Data on the cloud
The biggest attraction was Darca Command, cloud access that lets Dr Gillis monitor the Long Room from his home office. “It’s a real game changer,” he observes.
“It’s a real game changer.”
The platform
The Darca solutions behind it
One connected platform, Collect, Connect and Command, configured for this application.
