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.

Preventive Conservation Assessment is good for:

• Long-range preservation planning

• Prioritizing projects on a tight budget

• Achieving or maintaining accreditation

• Supporting fundraising campaigns

• Applying for grants

Temperature, moisture, and light are three of the biggest contributors to artwork deterioration. Many institutions use dataloggers to track these indicators, but analyzing that data and using it to make positive change is time-consuming and requires specialized knowledge. Let us do the heavy lifting of environmental assessment. Simply send us your environmental data, and we will analyze what is there and provide you with a report that highlights trends, concerns, and recommendations for improving collections environments.

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.

Emergency Planning is good for:

• Institutions with no emergency plan

• Institutions with an out of date emergency plan

• Achieving or maintaining accredidation

Emergency planning for traditional museums, libraries, and archives is different than planning for geographically diverse collections like public art. Through GIS Risk Assessment, 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.

GIS Risk Assessments are good for:

• Public art collections

• Institutions with multiple sites

Collection Conservation Assessment is the process of determining the overall condition of objects in a collection. 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.

Collection Conservation Assessment is good for:

• Developing handling, housing, treatment, and digitization priorities

• Incoming and outgoing loans

• Preparing for collection moves

• Preparing for digitization or rehousing projects

• Documenting condition for insurance purposes

• Post-incident documentation

Our assessors can work with you to develop a preventive conservation assessment that works for your needs. We can consult on collections moves, exhibition planning, storage redesigns, and more.