n.the conditions of temperature, humidity, and air quality that prevail in a room or stack area used for record storageKaplan, Holden, and Ludwig 1991, 510Prepared for the National Archives, this report considers that documents housed in containers and not directly exposed to the ambient environment that is potentially less damaging than the macroenvironment of the storage area.Bigourdan and Reilly 2000, 7Archivists must consider the relative merits of the macroenvironment approach versus the microenvironment approach. The former has equipment and operating costs, while the latter involves significant material and labor costs.Manning and Kremp 2000, 117It is very simplistic to divide storage neatly into macroenvironment and microenvironment as the two are obviously interconnected. Sometimes the one will be used to combat problems with the other. In the new British Library building, the environmental specification of photographs in the oriental Photographic Store was proving difficult to achieve. . . . Therefore as an interim measure dataloggers were placed inside the store, inside an empty box, and inside a drop-back box which already had photographs in it and the results were compared. The environment within the boxes was stable, compared to the cycling pattern outside. As an interim solution therefore, the photographs will be boxed to create microenvironments until the macroenvironment of the store is solved.CCA 2003b, 16Macroenvironment refers to the environmental conditions (relative humidity, temperature and air quality) within the record storage room. Within the macroenvironment environmental conditions can vary. These pockets of higher relative humidity/lower temperature and lower relative humidity/higher temperature are known as microenvironments. A microenvironment can also refer to the conditions inside a records storage box.Ritzenthaler 2010, 110–111The prevailing conditions of temperature, relative humidity, and air quality within a large open space (such as a stack area) are known collectively as the macroenvironment. Within a macroenvironment, conditions can vary depending on such factors as air circulation, the layout of stacks, or the presence of exterior walls. All of the conditions create various microenvironments that can exist within the macroenvironment.
