Analysing Objects to Tailor Environmental Preventive Conservation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Brief summary and General concept comments

The paper deals with a cutting-edge issue, since the preventive conservation is a fundamental step for conserving in the best way heritage collections, which are mainly characterised by various objects and, consequently, by materials with different needs according to their individuality in terms of preservation, considering the microclimate to which they are exposed to and the different decay mechanisms and rate change which could affect them.

The organisation of the article in three parts, according to the three approaches selected for analysing different datasets of diverse materials, is well arranged, since the sub-chapters, “introduction”, “method”, “results and discussion” and “informing preservation decisions” is a clear structure that helps the reader to follow the different parts.

Each section shows an accurate and high-quality analytical approach. The extensive datasets presented cover different aspects, enhancing the research in this field and giving practical solution for the preservation decision-makers.

Specific comments

Comments to the text are listed with the specific line numbers and collected in the attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript submitted for publication is of great importance and interest for our community. However, it is a summary of 3 very important material groups, dealing with
limestone
iron
parchment and leather.
It is written - in my opinion - by well known experts in the field of heritage science, but it is very inhomogeneous in the structure, organisation of the various chapters and also the bibliography should be improved.

The headlines of the various chapters should describe more the content.
Chapter 2 is dealing with the material group limestone, but you call it "analysing the composition of an object", which is just a few sentences.
Chapter 3 is dealing more or less with iron - you call it "deterioration rate measurements"
Please use a graph for all the numbers in Tab. 5

Chapter 4 is dealing with parchment and leather, but you call it "State of Preservation"
line 401: Please use the reference [37] and not (Larsen, 2007)
line 460: Use text. and not text,
Line 461: I suppose it should be NMR and not nmr
Why do you describe the experimental conditions for parchment in Supplimentary Methods? In chapters 2 and 3 they are included in the regular text.

In general, the description of all the analytical methods used for the various investigations is rather short (poor) and some of the techniques are not very well known in our field, e.g. DMA or AFM. These methods could be explained in the supplimentary.

Author Response

please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx