While cultural heritage practitioners and caretakers are often intimidated by "best practices," Practical Approaches to Collections Care helps to alleviate those concerns, offering a stepped approach to preservation encompassing a variety of collections care programs. The author, drawing on over a decade of experience working in libraries, museums, archives, and other historic sites, and specifically building off of her work as a Preservation Specialist at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts, discusses realistic, efficient, and sustainable approaches to collection housing, space planning, environmental management, facilities care, emergency preparedness, and much more. Giving examples of implementation and easy-to-follow guides that will allow readers to start from scratch or improve an already existing program, Forsko demonstrates how preservation can become a component of any collections care program. Encouraging the reader to start by taking small, manageable steps, the author shows that even the smallest of actions can make a difference that will ultimately help to preserve collections and ensure that the world’s heritage will remain intact for future generations. Practical Approaches to Collections Care takes an applied approach, making suggestions the reader can immediately implement no matter the size of their institution. It is an essential tool for stewards of cultural heritage collections, particularly collections managers, registrars, and preservation specialists. It will also be useful to students who are engaged in the study of collections care.

Prevention is an attempt to look into the future and have a positive influence on it – therefore it is one of the most important aspects in the area of collection care, the central, current field of applied research in conservation and restoration. With sustainability damage and loss are avoided, dangers averted and research conducted. Collection care is only successful, if the theory is appropriately implemented in museum practice.

Collection care is a fundamental responsibility for museums and other collecting institutions, and the foundation of collection stewardship is good collection management policies. The new third edition of Things Great and Small continues to be a comprehensive resource for developing, implementing, and revising collection management policies and includes new information for addressing prolonged or permanent closure of museums, wider parameters for collection storage environments, and sustainable collection management practices to cope with climate change. Drawing on more than 50 years of experience as a collection manager, educator, consultant, and AAM Museum Assessment Program peer reviewer, John E. Simmons reviews the most recent collection management thinking and literature, helps determine which policies an institution needs, and provides guidance on policy content. In this new edition, coverage of critical areas is expanded, including digital objects, intellectual property rights, deaccessioning, decolonization, standards and best practices, collection storage environment parameters, managing off-site storage facilities, health and safety, laws and regulations, risk management, and sustainable collection management practices. With more than 50 tables and charts and model policy templates, this major publication is aimed at museums of all kinds, historic houses and sites, and other collecting institutions.

This book is a practical guide for everyone who is confronted with a collection that hasn’t seen any preventive conservation or cataloging before. It helps gaining an overview, defining priorities, and organizing the work in a way it is safe for the objects and the people involved. It defines “logical exits”, goals to work towards where the collection is in a state the next steps can wait without risking the progress made. Later on, readers learn to define their own “logical exits” that fit their specific situation. Compared to other books about collections management it doesn’t focus on the details of collections care, but rather on the big picture of managing such a project. It assumes that at the beginning there is nothing but the reader and an unmanaged collection, so that part of the project is to source money, material, and people to help. The second edition has a new chapter on setting up collections management systems, the original text was reworked and in parts enhanced, there are additional success stories in the last chapter with references to them in the text, and the bibliography now contains some resources for natural history, indigenous, and archaeological collections.

While historically focusing on the object, the study of ethics in conservation has expanded to consider the human aspect of conservation work. This book offers a flexible framework to guide decision-making in line with this development, offering an inclusive, compassionate approach to collections care. This edited volume contributes theories and international examples for advancing conservation practice and providing best practice for the field that centers people in conservation of cultural heritage and collections care. The first part examines the ethical theory that underpins conservation decision-making by challenging outdated norms, introducing updated methods, and demonstrating new ways to approach compassionate collections care. The second part considers the challenges of human-centered ethics in conservation practice, while the final part provides real-world examples and case studies of these best practices in action, including successful challenges to colonial authority. By presenting both theoretical and practical aspects of prioritizing people, this volume establishes the need for rethinking conservation approaches while demonstrating how to do so effectively. Combining theory and practice, Prioritizing People in Ethical Decision-Making and Caring for Cultural Heritage Collections is valuable reading for conservation professionals, including collections managers, conservators, curators, and registrars. It will also benefit students working in Cultural Heritage Conservation, Museum studies, and Heritage Studies, as well as those taking courses in Art History and Anthropology.

There is a common misconception that collections management in museums is a set of rote procedures or technical practices that follow universal standards of best practice. This volume recognises collections management as a political, critical and social project, involving considerable intellectual labour that often goes unacknowledged within institutions and in the fields of museum and heritage studies. Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice brings into focus the knowledges, value systems, ethics and workplace pragmatics that are foundational for this work. Rather than engaging solely with cultural modifications, such as Indigenous care practices, the book presents local knowledge of place and material which is relevant to how collections are managed and cared for worldwide. Through discussion of varied collection types, management activities and professional roles, contributors develop a contextualised reflexive practice for how core collections management standards are conceptualised, negotiated and enacted. Chapters span national museums in Brazil and Uganda to community-led heritage work in Malaysia and Canada; they explore complexities of numbering, digitisation and description alongside the realities of climate change, global pandemics and natural disasters. The book offers a new definition of collections management, travelling from what is done to care for collections, to what is done to care for collections and their users. Rather than ‘use’ being an end goal, it emerges as a starting point to rethink collections work.

"Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals" is a multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the discussion of all aspects of handling, preserving, researching, and organizing collections. Curators, archivists, collections managers, preparators, registrars, educators, students, and others contribute.