The Fitzwilliam Museum contains a collection of artefacts of international importance. The monitoring and control of the environmental conditions in both the original 19th century buildings and the newly constructed areas of the museum, is a key element of the preventive conservation programme. Tobit Curteis Associates was commissioned to design and install an environmental monitoring system throughout the building and to provide training for the relevant members of staff.

Working in conjunction with Eltek Ltd (specialist dataloggers) a telemetric monitoring system was designed to cover the whole of the museum structure, which is accessible over the LAN to internal museum staff, but which could be securely accessed over the internet by external staff. Software was designed to allow the conservators to access and review the data in chart form or in graphic (using ground plans) or numeric windows.

Tools were developed within the software to enable automatic data processing and analysis, using either built in functions or equations required by the user. As a result, the software package provided a highly flexible level of data analysis and presentation generally only found in data processing packages, while at the same time allowing the basic user to simply review automatically analysed and charted data in a manner familiar to all conservators.