Preservation in Smart Libraries: An Experiment Involving IoT and Indoor Environmental Sensing

Monitoring environmental conditions can provide great benefits, allowing users to be aware of ambient parameters, such as temperature, humidity, pressure, lights, pollution, etc. Collecting and measuring such kind of information means that, after adequate analyses, specific actions can be decided and applied by policymakers in urban scenarios and in public smart buildings, with the aim of improving humans' comfort. Observing and keeping environmental conditions in a specific range is fundamental also for the conservation and the preservation of goods, such as cultural heritage, pieces of art, and also papery documentations. Hence, IoT and smart objects can play a strategic role in equipping smart buildings with systems devoted to such monitoring activities. In this paper, we present an experiment we have conducted with the aim of comparing sensed data obtained with different assessment scenarios, applied in a library storage within a university campus. We have monitored the indoor environmental conditions for three days for each assessment scenario, collecting data about temperature, relative humidity, pollutants. To do that, we have exploited a low-cost multi-sensor platform, named Canarin II, applying the IoT paradigms. We here discuss the results we have obtained, reflecting on the pros and cons of each sensor configuration in the library storage, for a better preservation of its books and papery documents.