AIC's 43rd Annual Meeting

Over the last three years almost 1,200 individuals, including conservators, registrars, preparators, curators, museum directors, facilities managers, lighting designers, manufacturers, consultants, and students, requested a copy of the “Guidelines for Assessing Solid-State Lighting for Museums” by Druzik and Michalski (2011). The guidelines are a working document keeping pace with evolving SSL technology and recognize the process of selecting SSL products for museums can be intimidating. In June 2014, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), and the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI), collaborated to investigate the use of the guidelines. A finding of particular note is that a majority (over 65%) of the questionnaire responders would use lighting controls if they worked with their existing lamp-based infrastructure and afforded lamp-by-lamp control of light output—and chromaticity, if possible. There are many motivations for considering and installing SSL products, specifically LEDs, in museums, and many of them are derived from concerns about sustainability. To the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD), sustainable lighting design “meets the qualitative needs of the visual environment with the least impact on the natural environment.” All lighting can be damaging to art objects, so museum lighting designers and conservation experts often design gallery lighting based on an acceptable rate of change. The best design manages the presentation of daylight and electric lighting. Historically, lighting in museums has been managed by controlling the spatial (beam shape, spill light) and spectral (UV, visible, IR) distribution of light, primarily through lamp selection. A variety of tools have been adopted for manipulating the output of installed lamps, including various forms of lenses, filters, diffusers, and baffles. As LEDs are transforming the lighting market, their inherently electronic nature is opening the door for the use of lighting control in new applications. The integration of wireless capabilities into lamps or modules, in particular, poses an interesting opportunity to better address the lighting-conservation paradox. Lighting controls enable the lighting designer to specify lighting exposure (illuminance, spectrum, time) and attempt to minimize damage while providing optimal viewing conditions for the visitor. Different exposure conditions can be scheduled, or enacted automatically in response to changing time of day, daylight levels, and even the presence of observers. Wireless lighting control holds the promise of integrating more easily with existing lamp-based infrastructure. Networked lighting control systems can communicate or log cumulative light exposure (lux-hours) per object, thereby increasing conservator knowledge of light exposure effects in the long term. A growing and more sophisticated set of controllable LED light sources and complimentary control technologies are becoming available in the market. This paper will present the opportunities afforded by commercially available wireless lighting controls for preventive conservation and hopefully convince the other 35%—the questionnaire responders who didn’t find a need to wireless lighting controls—that simple light switches and optical devices are no longer their only answer.