A National Strategy for the Conservation of Collections

This article relates the history from the nineteen seventies through the nineteen eighties of how a national plan for the care of collections was developed through the combined efforts of several national professional organizations. The pioneering work of the National Conservation Advisory Council is reviewed and its 1981 metamorphosis into the National Institute for Conservation, now Heritage Preservation, is described. How various studies and reports produced by the American Association of Museums, some in conjunction with the National and American Institutes for Conservation, helped inform a national strategy for the conservation and documentation of collections, is discussed. As the first elected chair of the board and council of the National Institute for Conservation, the author describes how the new organization contributed to the national planning process with projects like the Bay Foundation initiative to develop curriculum and train collections care specialists, Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS!), and the Conservation Assessment Program (CAP).