Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBPThe Fraunhofer IBP is one of the founding institutes of the Cultural Heritage Research Alliance. On October 28 in 2008, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Leibniz Association and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation formed the “Cultural Heritage Research Alliance”. To this end, their presidents signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” in Berlin.
The aim of the alliance is to pool the expertise of the three partners in the fields of humanistic, natural and cultural sciences. This will enable them to jointly develop and test new procedures and methods for restoring and conserving cultural assets, further intensify the transfer of knowledge between research and restoration practice, as well as raise public awareness of the importance of cultural heritage.
On December 8, 2015, the official kick-off event for a Research Alliance cooperation project was held on the topic “Protecting our cultural heritage with innovations from Fraunhofer”. In this three-year research project, which is funded by the Fraunhofer Executive Board, applied research will be carried out on cultural assets belonging to the Dresden State Art Collections, the Saxon State Library, the Dresden State Library and the University of Dresden Library.
The goal is to develop innovative restoration and conservation methods for these cultural assets in order to protect them in the long term and prevent their deterioration. The role of Fraunhofer IBP is to provide advice on preventive conservation, especially for the museums in Saxony, as well as to provide support with planning depot buildings, improving the energy efficiency of exhibition rooms and planning emergency strategies. A further aim is to develop a new, simple technology for controlling the climate inside smaller museums.