AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

Embedding Community Conservators in Public Libraries: Conservation as a Public Service is a new program being launched by the presenters. Community conservators will be library employees empowered by the remit to provide free, readily available, and in-person preservation services to individuals, groups, and institutions that don’t have the capacity to hire conservators and/or wish to be more hands-on in the care of their collections. They will:

* offer individual and group consultations on the care of personal and institutional items that can be transported to the library

* make “house” calls to provide guidance regarding the care of entire collections and objects that cannot be moved to the library

* offer disaster preparedness and response training, and guidance during disaster recovery

* hold workshops to teach material treatment skills and storage techniques to people of all ages, in the form of single workshops, series, summer camps and more

* provide open studio time when individuals and groups can work on conserving their objects with assistance from the community conservator

* facilitate events and discussions centered around the celebration of and/or mourning the loss of cultural heritage



This project builds on programs and workshops the project directors have already run, and a wide variety of work carried out by regional centers, field services programs, statewide heritage organizations and others. Our program will take the exciting, and as yet uncharted, path to providing the free exchange of knowledge and skills the public needs to preserve their personal and community cultural heritage, out of the heritage institution setting and into public libraries. 




Personal scrapbooks, quilts, photographs, journals, painted murals on the building next door, art in a local restaurant, archives of local religious institutions and historical societies and community organization are important to people and play crucial roles in maintaining a sense of identity, developing a sense of belonging, and acknowledging individual and collective cultural value. When people preserve these things they are uplifted and empowered, and their social well-being improves. 




Conservators hold valuable, specialized knowledge about the care and repair of cultural heritage and disaster preparedness and response that can help preserve these things. Accessing this knowledge outside the institutions and art galleries that typically employ these conservators is challenging, due primarily to cost and availability barriers, but also societal prioritization. Institutional structures and systems in the United States are more commonly organized to place conservators in cultural institutions and prestigious art galleries, responsible for the care and preservation of collections they hold. Many have tried to overcome these barriers by providing free conservation consultations to members of the public and hosting conservation resources on institutional websites, but this is resource intensive and hard to maintain. 




The community conservator project has a vision to launch programs in public libraries across the country in order to establish conservation as an accessible public service. It will also build new training paths for people to become community conservators, creating a new sector of the field for practitioners.