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This special issue of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation on collection care grew out of an initiative of AIC’s Collection Care Network to develop resources that both represent and assist the range of professionals who are committed to “the critical importance of preventive conservation as the most effective means of promoting the long-term preservation of cultural property” (Guidelines for Practice of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works, #20). When reviewed together, the six articles in this issue illustrate a wide range of collection care initiatives, show how expanding access and developing partnerships can help meet collection care goals, and highlight the creative solutions that can manifest through these approaches.
Preventive conservation became an established concept with the publication of The Museum Environment in the 1970s; at that time the core areas of concerns were framed. Over the subsequent decades, groups of practitioners and researchers developed those ideas into the form we recognize today. Concepts first mooted in the 1970s were developed into models and practice by the late 1990s. Since then, conservators and allied professionals have challenged, tested, and evolved these concepts, adding depth and offering improvements in practice.
This special issue captures a mature, engaged, and reflective profession. Taylor offers his latest thinking on collection condition surveys. Taking forward work from his first publication with Stevenson in 1999, his article is a culmination of decades of research into how best to conduct collection condition surveys. Surveys are a tool that underpin investment in collection management planning and are utilized in museums and other cultural heritage institutions world-wide. The paper demonstrates how perspectives from outside the traditional boundaries of preventive conservation can be integrated into our theoretical concerns and practical activities.
Collection care cannot occur in isolation; it is a profoundly social activity that aims to protect the collection while ensuring its use — a point put forward by Torres and her co-authors. Their article helps put behind us the timeworn cliché of having to choose between preservation and access. Working from a starting point of space restrictions resulting in both poor preventive conservation and poor access, the team use careful risk management with meaningful consultation and clear goals to devise a plan to protect and use the collections. The paper reminds us that a critical role of collection care is to recognize and realize the value of collections.
The paper from Kaczkowski and the team from the Smithsonian reverberates with the themes of consultation, research, reflection, engagement, and use that offers a model for collection care decision-making. They explore the synergy between offering safe storage and high standards of preventive conservation. Through systematic and meaningful stakeholder consultation, the team established the parameters of their research. Although the project is technical in the analysis of potential contaminants of storage units for natural history collections, the impact of the research shows how collaboration can better satisfy the needs and concerns of various stakeholders. In a wonderful detail the authors note that each stakeholder was slightly biased to their own operational goal and yet this bias was an asset to the decision-making process, allowing collaboration and balance to be central to their undertaking.
Pearlstein describes how graduate students at UCLA calculated building energy and environmental data in a LEED building that stores library collections. This project shows the challenges of teaching sustainability to students in museum, library, and archives programs as well as the benefits of discussions with allied professionals. The students learned from the architect and the engineer who were involved in the LEED process as well as conservators who are often tasked with determining environmental storage parameters. By hearing from allied professionals, students better understood the challenges of sustainability initiatives and that collection care does not happen in a silo.
Wain’s article offers testimony to the importance of affective and sensory experiences when engaging with collections, placing both tangible and intangible aspects of the collections within their definition of value. Wain notes that objects are an embodiment of both skills and social culture and that current generations pass on both the tangible fabric of the objects and the “knowledge and culture surrounding their use.” In this article, this argument is applied to heritage machinery but has resonance for the whole profession. Like Pearlstein, Wain refers to one of the great advances in preventive conservation of the 1990s: the agents of deterioration. She identifies the loss of sensation from never experiencing the sight, smells, and feel of moving machinery and challenges us to consider how well this loss of intangible might be calculated in risk assessments. Her paper encourages us to offer serious weight to aspects of intangible heritage that can only be acquired by direct physical experience and how that interaction is part of holistic preservation.
Collection care decisions are typically bound by the desire to meet best practices within the confines of financial resources. In order to care for collections within both of those parameters, creativity is often needed. The H.L. Hunley, a Civil War submarine, and its contents have been undergoing conservation treatment; long-term storage for its artifacts required a cost-effective solution that could meet specific environmental parameters. The solution came from a unique source: refurbished marine containers. Rivera demonstrates that preventive conservation encompasses consultation, research, testing, innovation, and reflection to offer sustainable solutions.
The articles in this special issue show us how far we have come as a profession. They also point to our future. Throughout this issue, we hear about working with students to test theory, enact practice, and to challenge orthodoxy. Students represent the way forward and if they are engaged in work such as those projects represented here, they will carry forward evidence-based, critical preventive conservation that is inclusive and practical. If the new generation of conservators and allied professionals answer this charge, we can hope in another decade or so to see the changes that they have brought and be confident that cultural heritage will be better for their efforts.
—Mary Coughlin and Jane Henderson, special issue organizers