As you may have noticed, the temperature and humidity in Philadelphia have been a bit, shall we say, variable over the past week. Such swings are not good for books and art, since it can cause them to expand and contract, soak up moisture, etc. So we do our best to keep everything as stable as possible within our museum spaces and we count on Hobos help us do that. Hobos are data loggers that record temperature and humidity. We have a number of these little devices throughout our museum spaces and they take readings every ten minutes. We can then offload the data, sort it, graph it, etc. to help us see what’s going on. 
You probably won’t see these little guys, since we do our best to keep them out of everyone’s way, but they are hard at work nonetheless. (If you do spy one, please do not touch or disturb, since that will throw off the readings and will really confuse me when I try to make sense of the data). We even have smaller versions that can be tucked into packing crates when objects travel to make sure everything goes smoothly. These hobos are certainly not bums!
