The museum environment: A protocol for evaluation of microclimatic conditions

•Cultural heritage is a unique witness of our past and exhibits high vulnerability.•Preventive conservation policies are becoming life insurances for museum collections.•The high complexity of museum systems requires special operational protocols.•A special protocol for the characterization of IEQ in museums is proposed.•This tool is useful to choice interventions and improve the state of conservation.

The cultural heritage is a unique and irreplaceable witness of our past and it is vulnerable to natural disasters and anthropic behaviours. Moreover, collections kept in museums are not enough safeguarded due to unsuitable environmental conditions. An in-depth analysis of the literature of the field reveals a lack in preventive conservation strategies aimed to assure the protection, or increase the life expectancy, of collections and objects. From this perspective, the exceptional complexity of the environmental control in museums requires easy operational protocols including all variables in play.The protocol here discussed is aimed to the microclimatic assessment of museum environment, the quantification of factors responsible for the degradation processes and the choice of most appropriate interventions to improve the state of conservation.This evaluation method neither meant to be exhaustive or definitive, but aims to serve as a reference for technicians and conservation managers, who require clear procedures and applicable interventions, especially in case of poor economic or management resources. At the present, the adoption of standard procedures in this area is necessary to simplify and standardize the procedures, and to regulate the relatively young field of environmental monitoring for the cultural heritage conservation.