Author: Jane Thompson Webb
This guide is a companion to the Successful Basic Interventive Conservation guide. Together they provide a practical foundation to understanding ‘preventive’ and ‘interventive’ conservation of our collections.
How long do you expect the collections in your museum to last? Ten years? A hundred? A thousand? We tend to assume that once an object enters a museum it will last forever, but sadly this is not the case. Our objects can begin to decay from the moment they are made.
If we get the conditions right in our museums we can try to make sure that this is a slow process. The process of making the decay mechanism as slow as possible is called ‘collection care’ or ‘preventive conservation’.
Successful Collection Care (opens in a new tab) Successful Collection Care (Welsh) (opens in a new tab)