New Systems for Document Public Art
from Witty's Blog: Wikipedia, History, Museum -

An interesting series of open-access projects that uses intangible digital media to bring attention to tangible public sculptures and art.  This not only generates more attention and awareness of the artworks, but can also be easily implemented in many, many other contexts.  Every city should have one or more of such projects running!

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from KFSK Radio -
Conservator works on Alaska documents
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When the museum or archives cannot come to the conservator, the (paper) conservator goes to the museum and archives. Maybe this could be the model to help smaller museums and heritage centres that cannot afford permanent in-house staff.
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from The New York Times -
Tile by Tile, a Mural Is Saved
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A paint-staking project in relocating a ceramic tile wall mural, prompting the insight:

"Anything artistic that goes in a subway should be put on some type of removable support."

A lesson in there somewhere for all urban transport authorities?
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from The Guardian -
How the National Trust is finding its mojo
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"The perennial battle inside the trust has always been that between conservation and access, preservation and enjoyment. 'But really, it needn't be,' insists [Mark] Harold [, regional director at National Trust]. 'Not every room in every built property has precious textiles. We own lots of land; not all of it is equally sensitive.'"

Possibly a lesson for museums - not to operate solely on the basis of preempting damage as if all artefacts are masterpieces but to recognise that all preservation decisions are inherently biased. The point is to be open about what values guide those decisions - for better or for worse.
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from The New York Times -
Online, It’s the Mouse That Runs the Museum
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It is less about being populist than understanding that if it is the victorious that writes history, then authority is not winning people over as it has been before.
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from The Observer -
Enlightened age for the arts in Britain is cast into shadow
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And to end the year with an eye on what is happening in UK museums that could serve for all as a lesson (from the past) and a warning (from the future), perhaps:

"The culture shift began with free entry to museums and has developed down the years to force once standoffish institutions to engage with wider School trips, outreach and working with diverse communities have come to rank as highly as research and fundraising."

And,

"The fear is that a collapse in private philanthropy combined with a political arms race of expenditure cuts and quango-bashing could soon return our galleries and museums to the dark days of charges, closures and pandering to the familiar."

from The Guardian -
China loses thousands of historic sites
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"The last 20 years have been the worst time for cultural heritage site protection with the rapid development. It is even worse than in the Cultural Revolution"

Intense urban development finishing what misguided ideology could not ... and, then some.
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from The New York Times -
An Italian City Shaken to Its Cultural Core
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"Shortages of money, political will, architectural good sense and international attention — along with a distinctly Italian predilection for a kind of magical thinking — threaten to finish what the quake started."

This is yet another case-in-point for national efforts in setting aside funds and identifying expertise before crisis happens.
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from New York Times -
Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell
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A non-destructive method of detecting elevated levels of harmful chemicals inherent in the paper. If proved consistent, this could be potentially useful in prioritising and targeting efforts in the preservation of paper-based artefacts.
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from The New York Times -
When Ancient Artifacts Become Political Pawns
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"But the larger truth is that all patrimony arguments ultimately live or die in the morally murky realm of global relations, meaning that modern governments like Egypt’s and Iraq’s may win sympathy today by counting on Western guilt about colonialism when asking for the return of art from ancient sites within their current borders. At the same time there’s no international clamor for Russia to return storerooms of treasures it stole from Germany at the end of the war, or, for that matter, for Sweden to fork over the spoils of a war 350 years ago with Denmark. It’s about emotion, not airtight logic and consistent policy."

Perhaps, the way to take all these twists and turns of events is to realise that when a field of professional work becomes sufficiently mature, petty politics moves right in. Welcome to the world ...
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from The Art Newspaper -
Disposing of cultural artefacts in university collections
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Treating all artefacts in a collection as "equally valuable" would seem like an enlightened approach - but in fact it is a mask to hide unthinking wasteful practices and a deep reluctance to make (and live with) subjective decisions.
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from The New York Times -
Foundation Helps Archives to Go Online
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A timely reminder that preservation of heritage and historical materials do not just happen by themselves - no matter how much good intentions there are.
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from The Guardian -
Digging deep
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A case of ground-up knowledge activism, literally, which is a more sustainable approach to ensuring the long-term viability of archaeological work. Deep-pocket funding can often attract the "wrong" kind of attention and its share of fair-weather "champions".
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from National Museum Directors' Conference (UK) -
NMDC adopts guidelines to reduce museums’ carbon footprint
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With the greater awareness of how the implementation of museum preservation measures can often lead to very inefficient use of energy - and contributing to global environmental problems - museums in the UK have taken the first necessary step in acknowledging the issue and committing to implementing sensible guidelines to balance the needs of preservation and limited natural resources.

The 4 pertinent principles of the guidelines are:

- Environmental standards should become more intelligent and better tailored to clearly identified needs. Blanket conditions should no longer apply. Instead conditions should be determined by the requirements of individual objects or groups of objects and the climate in the part of the world in which the museum is located;

- Care of collections should be achieved in a way that does not assume air-conditioning or any other current solutions. Passive methods, simple technology that is easy to maintain, and lower energy solutions should be considered;

- Natural and sustainable environmental controls should be explored and exploited fully;

- When designing and constructing new buildings or renovating old ones, architects and engineers should be guided significantly to reduce the building’s carbon footprint as a primary objective.

See also:
Full document of NMDC guiding principles for reducing museums’ carbon footprint
Paper presented by Sir Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate, May 2008.
Paper by Mark Jones, Director, V&A

Link via IIC News.
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from The Art Newspaper -
Civic Society Initiative launched in the UK, with added social networking tools
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The news is not so much in the use of Twitter ... (oh, please...). Rather, the survival of civic societies (liken to your neighbourhood-sized National Trust) in the UK points to an ingrain sense of heritage and urban preservation - done at the local level and from the ground-up - which avoids all the pretensions of corporate-speak that has become the norm for heritage agencies, here and abroad.

See also Civic Society Initiative web-site and briefing paper (PDF format).
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from The Guardian -
Scottish laser pioneers lead way in preserving world heritage treasures
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There is still the nagging suspicion that once a monument has been "preserved" as data points from a scan - then efforts to maintain the actual site might lapse. After all, would not a digital copy be a more accurate and truer representation - so why bother?
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from The Independent -
The collapse of Moscow: Architectural heritage being destroyed
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"But the rapid development of Moscow has not been unequivocally positive; it has come with haphazard building practices, low-quality constructions and the neglect or destruction of historical buildings. [...] The crisis is not limited to the capital. Historians and activists say that Moscow's poor example has been aped across Russia. Of most concern is St Petersburg, the Tsarist capital whose elegant centre was spared the usual Soviet replanning and is free of monolithic concrete structures. Now that is changing."

A clear case of how apathetic heritage preservation practices are not only "contagious" but can be disturbingly prevalent.
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from The Art Newspaper -
The Getty puts panel painting into perspective
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Something which conservation, as a profession, should spend more time thinking about and taking effective actions - before it is too late.
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from Guardian -
Legal row over National Portrait Gallery images placed on Wikipedia
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A most unfortunate approach where copyright is totally irrelevant in the age of ubiquitous information. The National Portrait Gallery is coming out of this looking like a big bad bully. Instead, the use of a suitable Creative Commons license - allowing for non-commercial use with acknowledgement of authorship - would have been more palpable.
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from The Telegraph -
World's oldest Bible published in full online
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from IIC News -
Earliest Christian Bible virtually restored
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Codex Sinaiticus
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In this project, the minimal conservation treatment rendered - repairs made to the pages so that they could be photographed, and nothing more - was crucial in enabling a wider dissemination of the context via electronic means. Would the understanding of "minimal interventuion" in another era (say, without computers) be different? Or has to be different...
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