Despite their best intentions, professionals and institutions dealing with the preservation of cultural property may apply unrealistic standards, guidelines or lists of best practice, without clear priorities, or realistic benefits. With limited resources, decision-makers are immediately confronted with difficult choices in planning conservation strategies.

Recently introduced to the field of cultural property preservation, risk management offers a sound methodology for the effective incorporation of the available knowledge into conservation practice. It allows an integrated view of all expected damages and loss to cultural property, thus providing a useful tool to assess museum needs, to establish priorities and to design more efficient conservation strategies

Objectives:

• Raise awareness of risks among museum staff and decision makers.
• Disseminate a tool to assess museums’ needs, establish priorities and design efficient conservation strategies

Activities:

• Risk assessments reports produced by museums in Africa, Asia and Latin America
• A learning kit*, including a manual and risk assessment tools available for wider dissemination (*developed by CCI, the Canadian Conservation Institute, and ICCROM , in collaboration with ICN, the Institute for Collections)
  

  Reports and materials:

• Draft manual on collection risk management (Spanish)
• Assessment report of the manual on collection risk management 

Other key areas of the partnership:

• Documentation of museum collections
• Preventive conservation for collections in storage
• Teamwork for Integrated Emergency Management

For more information on the UNESCO-ICCROM Partnership for the Preventive Conservation of Museum Collections in Developing Countries (2007-2010),
contact: Nao Hayashi, UNESCO Section of Museums and Cultural Objects

Project Start Date: 01-01-2007   End Date: 31-12-2010