Abstract
The care and management of historic garments within museum collections involves implementing specific environmental controls for long-term preservation. There are standard measurements for temperature, relative humidity, and light levels within storage areas that are regularly monitored. For historic garment collections, light exposure is one of the most damaging. When an object is accessioned, it goes through an extensive protocol in which all aspects of the objects condition are reported. Determining the true color of a historic garment can be difficult when the materials are faded and/or discolored. Often, visual identification is the only measure used to determine and report the color of the object. The absence of an accurate and objective color measurement during the accessioning process makes long-term color degradation assessment difficult. This study investigates the accuracy and replicability of a mobile spectrophotometer and app used systematically with an adapted zone grid system to objectively determine true color of historic women’s swimsuits within a museum collection. Data was collected from two hands-on workshops held at museum/archive conferences in which the participants, working in teams of two, used the mobile spectrophotometer, app, and the adapted zone grid system to take the color measurements of an object. From the data, an overall average CIE La b* measurement was obtained for each object. The CIEDE2000 formula was used to calculate the Delta E, the difference between the standard overall CIE La* b* measurement and the standard. The resulting measurements were analyzed for consistency with the standard, and between the two workshops.
Presenters
Amanda J. ThompsonAssociate Professor, Clothing, Textiles, and Interior Design, University of Alabama, Alabama, United States Marcy L. Koontz
Curator, The Fashion Archive + Associate Professor, Clothing, Textiles, and Interior Design, The University of Alabama, Alabama, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Museums, Collections Management, Fashion History, Color, Spectrophotometry, Mobile Technology
Digital Media
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