Assessments

  • Prioritizing projects on a tight budget? Working towards achieving or maintaining accreditation? Starting a fundraising campaign or applying for a grant? Preventive Conservation Assessment is an overall snapshot of your organization and the condition of your collections. Your assessor will look at collections management, condition, storage, and exhibition to identify what you’re doing right and what projects will have the biggest impact on long-term preservation. Recommendations are organized into short-term, medium-term, long-term, and ongoing goals to help you identify what can be done now and what can be saved for the future.

  • Writing an emergency plan, but don’t know where to start? Emergency plans are essential documents for collecting institutions to have in place. Your assessor will assess risk to your organization from macro to micro. We identify natural and manmade hazards at the federal, state, local, and site level to come up with a risk profile that is customized to your location. We then work with you to develop a comprehensive emergency management plan that works for your situation.

  • Are you a public art collection or an organization with collections that are spread out across a large geographic area? Do you need to write an emergency plan that incorporates multiple sites? Your assessor will use an innovative Risk Index Scoring System developed though NEH-funded research to assess the risk of hazards to artworks and sites based on their geographic location. That risk profile is then used to develop a comprehensive emergency plan that is exactly tailored to your organization’s specific needs.

  • Need a snapshot of the condition of objects in your collection? Trying to come up with priorities for conservation treatment, rehousing, or digitization? Need to document the condition of your collection for insurance or loans? Your assessor will examine the structural and surface conditions of objects as well as the condition of their boxes, folders, and supports to help you identify preservation priorities. Collection Conservation Assessments can be done item-by-item or by stratified random sampling to help you get the most accurate picture of your conservation and storage needs no matter the size of the collection.

  • Planning a collections move? Have questions about safely exhibiting materials? Have something else in mind? Our assessors can work with you to develop a preventive conservation assessment that works for your needs.

Gallery Maintenance, Dusting, & Mold Remediation

  • Cobwebs in the stacks? Fingerprints on the exhibition cases? Dust can attract pests, harbor mold, and become acidic overtime, causing damage to collections. Keeping exhibition and storage spaces clean is important whether you’re a museum, library, or archive, or your just trying to maintain your personal art collection. Dusting can also be tricky. Using the wrong cleaner or the wrong technique can irreversibly damage artworks. Our team uses museum-quality materials and techniques to dust collection spaces including exhibition spaces, art storage areas, and private businesses and residences.

  • Find mold in your storage space? Suspect an incoming accession or loan could be contaminated? Mold isn’t something to mess with. It can be damaging to objects, harmful to your health, and difficult to remediate. Our conservators can help you determine whether you are dealing with mold or one of its common imitators. Then, we will walk you though the process of inactivating that mold (drying it out) so that our conservators can come onsite to surface clean affected objects using museum-quality materials and techniques.

Consulting

Working on a capital project or large-scale collections move? Need help communicating about the needs of collections with engineers and administrators? It can be helpful to have a preventive conservator on your team when renovating or building new collections storage and exhibition spaces. MC Conservation can help you navigate the complex process of capital projects by providing you with recommendations for temperature and humidity ranges, light levels, building finishes, storage furniture, and more.