Cultural Heritage Research Group

On 11th and 12th of July 2026 the PhD student of our group Nefeli Avgerou and our lab specialist, Guilherme Antunes Veríssimo attended the Gordon Research Seminar – Scientific Methods in Cultural Heritage Research, which took place in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. During this seminar, Nefeli presented her poster with her latest results in the ‘Crizzling READ MORE

We are delighted to share that our grant proposal ‘Evaluating wool deterioration in historical tapestries to support their conservation’ received funding within the OPUS 30 programme of the NCN National Science Centre! Our team will collaborate on this project with Jagiellonian University and two heritage institutions taking care of major tapestry collections – the Royal READ MORE

Over 50 people from several countries participated in two two-day workshops on the HERIe digital platform at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of London/English Heritage, organized as part of the GoGreen project. We hope everyone not only learned something but also had fun. So far, we have over 4,500 registered HERIe users. READ MORE

Have you ever wondered what happens when historical glass is exposed to fluctuating RH environments? Our project on ‘Crizzling of Historical Glass’ is trying to answer this question by the use of Acoustic Emission measurements on artificially aged replicas of historical glass during RH cycles. This week, doctoral student Nefeli Avgerou had the chance to READ MORE

…so does ours! Last week, a two-day workshop on the digital tool HERIe for decision-making support in the field of preventive conservation was organised in Rome for the collection managers, educators and heritage scientists. The tool developed within several projects, including IPERION HS and recently the GoGreen project, is used by more than 3000 users READ MORE

This year, our colleague Marcin Strojecki completed a year-long environmental monitoring program at the Dominican Church of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius. The project was done in cooperation with the POLONIKA National Institute of Polish Cultural Heritage Abroad. Long-term measurements of temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, and airborne particulate matter will allow for the…

We would like to cordially invite you to the International Workshop: Risk Assessment of Cultural Heritage that will take place on 30th Sep – 1st Oct 2025 in Gdańsk. Detailed programe and registration: https://www.mng.gda.pl/2025/07/23/warsztaty/ This workshop is developed in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute, the National Museum in Gdańsk, and the Jerzy Haber Institute of Cataly…

Not only are museums of fine art using the HERIe platform, but now also museums of natural history. …and we use the occasion to see wild bisons on the prairies.

The SubTropolis is the underground cave storage environment in Kansas City. With over 8,100,000 square feet of leasable space, 10.5 miles of lighted, wide, paved roads, and 2.1 miles of railroad track, it provides consistent, year-round temperature and humidity-controlled tenant space. We visited spaces occupied by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Nelson-Atkins Museum READ…

… Cultural Heritage Research Group! We are pleased to announce that at this year’s Polish Science Gala, we received the Minister of Science and Higher Education award for significant achievements in implementation activities. Minister Marcin Kulasek appreciated the preventive conservation platform HERIe, which was created and developed by our group in cooperation with institutions leading READ MO…

The latest article of the PVCare project: Preventive conservation strategies for poly(vinyl chloride) objects on the migration of plasticisers in heritage objects made of PVC has been published in the Journal of Environmental Management. The publication was created in cooperation between our group and scientists from the NanoBiomedical Center of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań READ MORE

Last week, Marcin Bury and Sonia Bujok presented their results at the XXIV conference Chemical Analysis in the Protection of Heritage Objects (https://analizazabytkow.pl/) organised by the Biological and Chemical Research Centre at the University of Warsaw.Marcin shared the results of his latest publication on the development of cracks in canvas paintings induced by changes in READ MORE

The November workshops of the preventive conservation platform HERIe began with a sentimental journey of our group leader to Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage and continued at the Getty Conservation Institute, where we discussed the use of digital tools for risk assessment of heritage objects with representatives of GLAM institutions from the USA. The READ MORE

How do corner cracks in canvas paintings are formed and how do they differ from cracks in the pictorial layer in the central part of the painting? What is the risk of crack formation due to drops in relative humidity? Find the answers in the latest article Development of craquelure patterns in paintings on canvas READ MORE

The warm September sun is the perfect aura for group integration! This year we decided to visit the treasures of the Świętokrzyskie area, and we started on a high note by visiting the recently opened Archaeological Museum in Wiślica, where the undisputed gem is the Romanesque floor, according to historians, depicting figures of princes from READ MORE

To clean or not to clean? This is one of the most frequently asked questions by conservators who deal with artworks made of softened plastics. The essence of this conservation puzzle is the process that takes place at the molecular level. Let’s imagine a space loosely filled with long polymer chains, which are the basic READ MORE

On April 11, we hosted colleagues from Polish museums and heritage scientists in the beautiful scenery of the Wawel Royal Castle. The occasion for the meeting was a workshop on preventive conservation, which was organized in the cooperation with the Polish Consortium for Cultural Heritage Research E-RIHS.pl. Such a meeting had to start with identifying READ MORE

The end of every project is a time for summing up, but also an extremely intense period of discussion, planning new experiments and considering new research directions. The GRIEG-Craquelure project, which has just come to an end, provided answers to many questions and aroused our scientific curiosity. We shared the project results with a group READ MORE

Our colleagues had a unique opportunity to determine the fracture toughness of the 30-year-old oil paints from Mecklenburg’s Paint Reference Collection belonging to the Smithsonian Institution. The paper recently published in the Heritage Science journal provides new data for the analysis of fracturing and delamination in oil paintings and indicates that oil paints are much READ MORE