What is Conservation?
CONSERVATION describes a broad range of measures taken to safeguard our material cultural heritage ensuring its accessibility to present and future generations. It is a diverse profession treating objects ranging from butterfly wings to battleships. The diversity requires it it to be divided into specialized areas which include Painting, Object, Paper, Textile, and Furniture Conservation.
The field is unified under procedural and ethical guidelines set forth by the national and international professional organizations that continually monitor the profession, making sure that it maintains high standards and remains current.(1)
The Americian professional body, "AIC", has determined that it is essential for each treatment to include examination, documentation and preventive considerations.
Examination of the object helps determine the the causes of its deterioration, and its properties, nature, and method of manufacture.
Its purpose is to:
- articulate the need for conservation measures (e.g., treatment, preventive care)
- establish a benchmark against which to assess change of the cultural property through use, during treatment, or over time
- preserve information that may be obscured or lost through use, during treatment, or over time
- serve as a reference for additional study or decision making (e.g., acquisition, exhibition, loan, site management planning, scholarly research)
- facilitate communication about the nature, care, deterioration patterns, and use of the cultural property.
Documentation is a written (and in some cases pictorial) record of the condition of an object or collection before, during, and after treatment. It outlines in detail the treatment methods and materials used. Its purpose is to:
- establish the condition of cultural property
- aid in its care by providing information helpful to future treatment
- add to the profession's body of knowledge
- aid the owner or custodian, and society as a whole, in the appreciation and use of cultural property by increasing understanding of an object's aesthetic, conceptual, and physical characteristics
- aid the conservation professional by providing a reference that can assist in the continued development of knowledge and by supplying records that can help avoid future misunderstanding.
Preventive Conservation is intervention taken to retard deterioration and prevent damage that happens in a collection due to interaction between collection objects, people, and the environment.(2) Examples of preventive conservation are appropriate measures and actions for registration, storage, handling, packing and transportation, security, environmental management (light, humidity, pollution and pest control), emergency planning, education of staff, public awareness, and legal compliance.(3)
When speaking of Conservation the term RESTORATION or RESTORERS often comes up. In common parlance this term refers to an attempt to bring cultural property closer to its original appearance or its appearance at a particular period in time, which unfortunately is sometimes achived by sacrificing other important considerations.
When used in the conservation profession the term Restoration refers to the actions applied to a stable item in order to facilitate its appreciation, understanding, and use. Professional conservators only use these actions when the item has lost part of its significance or function through alteration or deterioration. Their choices take into consideration the long term preservation of original material and respect for the object on a number of other levels as well. Most often such actions modify the appearance of the item. Examples of restoration are: retouching a painting, reassembling a broken sculpture, reshaping a basket, filling losses on a glass vessel.(4)
(1) The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC), Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI),Institute of Conservation (ICON), International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM).
(2) Preventive Team, Conservation Division Winterthur Museum, Guidelines and Procedures for Preventive Conservation at Winterthur Museum", (Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library 2005)
(3) (ref. ICOM-CC document 'Terminology to characterize the conservation of tangible cultural heritage', prepared for ICOM-CC meeting in New Delhi, 2008).
(4) ibid