AIC's 44th Annual Meeting

Strategic Management of Collection Storage to serve an Institution and SocietyModerators:  Lisa Elkin, American Museum of Natural History and Christopher Norris, Peabody Museum, Yale University
Collections are not simply to have and to hold. The point of keeping collections is to enable an institution to fulfill its mission and, more broadly, to serve the continuance and betterment of society as a whole. Speakers will provide varying perspectives:

Democratizing the Museum/Respectful and Responsible Stewardship (speakers:  Sanchita Balachandran, Johns Hopkins University and Kelly McHugh, National Museum of the American Indian)
The speaker(s) will discuss the practical work of democratizing collections care.  All collections demand a deep and sustained engagement with non-museum stakeholders who have claims to both the tangible and intangible aspects of museum objects.  The ultimate aim of preservation is to restore the social and cultural relevance of collections, thus transforming and revitalizing not only collections, but also collecting institutions, stakeholders, and staff.

Partnerships in Collection Care (speaker:  Christopher Norris, Peabody Museum, Yale University)
The speaker will discuss the importance of collection care professionals working closely with allied professionals to preserve collections more effectively and make them ever more broadly accessible. These allied professionals include both staff within the institution and consultants bringing special skills and knowledge. Dynamically forming teams with members ranging from maintenance staff to directors of foundations will greatly enhance the power of collection care professionals to benefit their institution and society as a whole.

Risk Management and Preventive Conservation (speaker:  Robert Waller, Protect Heritage Corp.
The speaker will describe preventive conservation as a system and as a sub-system within larger institutional and societal systems further supporting concepts covered in the previous talks. A risk assessment and management approach will be introduced. That approach provides a rational framework for ensuring that resources for preventive conservation are as effective deployed as possible for retaining values of the collection to the institution and to society.  That is accomplished by ensuring that, even from multiple perspectives of hazards, collection units, locations, values, and so on, there are no egregious risks affecting collections.

These presentations are born from content developed for the upcoming book, Preventive Conservation:  Collection Storage, an AIC, SPNHC, SI and GWU partnership publication (expected publication date, winter 2017).  All talks will use examples from subsequent chapters in the book to illustrate points.