AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

In this presentation, an archivist and a conservator will share their experiences working and learning together over the past decade, as well as their research on a persistent communication gap between their professions. This gap often leads to missed opportunities for collaboration that could benefit archivists and conservation, as well as the collections and the communities they serve. The gap widened in the wake of the seminal archival management article “More Product, Less Process,” published by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner in 2005, which advocated for more efficient practices to reduce backlogs and make collections more accessible. In this article, conservation activities were portrayed as excessive and unnecessary. As a result, many archivists became dismissive of conservation, leading to tensions and a sense of misrepresentation within the conservation community.

The presentation will introduce a model for integrating preventive conservation into a holistic collection management program. When building new workflows for archival accessioning and processing, the presenters worked together to proactively develop local standards for collection management. These standards address known legacy issues and improve collections care work going forward. 

This model emphasizes the importance of archivists and conservators learning each other's professional ethics, standards, and training to improve communication and foster more effective collaboration, while embracing humility, curiosity, and mutual respect. This learning occurs through committee work, reading groups, collection planning meetings, after action reviews, and events. Open discussion of our different priorities and perspectives pave the way for creating institutional programs that promote ethical, sustainable collection stewardship and have the potential for improving work experiences. The presenters will tell the stories of successes and challenges faced in their collaborations.