Assessment of environmental condition of repositories in government departments in Iran

To identify factors causing damage to archival as well as library materials held in government departments’ repositories, in order to develop criteria for preservation practices consistent with international standards, thereby diminishing the costs of future disinfecting and repair, in particular damages caused by human factors.Method/Research Design: Pollution data resulting from the monitoring of, and sampling from, external repositories of 17 departments, and environmental conditions of 63 repositories, was identified and compared with CFU. Suggestions were made for the improvement of the situation in each the organization. The temperature, humidity and light levels of the repositories were measured. Also, the number of micro organisms in the air were examined and checked against the standards, then tagged and analyzed using SPSS application. As the data did not follow a normal distribution, Spearman correlation was employed to correlate factors such as light and temperature with the presence of fungi. Standards of light levels, humidity and temperature are not met in the majority of repositories. Lack of meaningful correlation between humidity and fungi is an indication of the fact that humidity in 87% of repositories is below standard.