AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Preventive conservation is growing: it features in project planning, there are increasing numbers of preventive conservator jobs, and there is greater availability of preventive conservation graduate training opportunities. But is the sign of preventive conservation success the proliferation of preventive conservator positions? Or is it embracing the diversity of perspectives that a range of practitioners bring and a focus on growing practice and engagement? Could the best way to advance preventive conservation be through recognition and development of a range of skill sets to address preventive conservation in different settings?

Preventive conservation may become stronger through growing practice centered on facilitation. To tightly define preventive conservator roles may be to risk the same pitfalls of tightly defining the conservator: to perpetuate transactional conservation relationships and inadvertently create barriers to conservation involvement in greater institutional planning, so critical for preventive conservation success.

Instead of identifying success through anointing practitioners with preventive conservator titles, should we instead build and strengthen collaborative training cohorts, coach future leaders, and work to establish institutional frameworks so critical to the recognition, deployment, and success of preventive conservation approaches? In supporting a range of professionals focusing on preventive conservation, do we instead create professional development benchmarks, providing accessible professional development opportunities for the preventive conservation technician to the director-level operational strategist? Given preventive conservation’s interconnectedness at an institutional level with facilities management, sustainable energy use efforts, storage design, health & safety, climate resilience planning, and other roles, facilitation-forward preventive conservation recognizes the many voices that collaborate in forwarding the field and opens doors.

As I wrote in my blog “How Do We Enhance Collaboration: Do feelings of professional exclusion lead us to seek answers from those most like ourselves?” as part of Dr. Joelle Wickens’s project What is Conservation?, I challenge us to think about the bigger tent of conservation. We need to consider how to develop aptitudes and skills within a range of preventive conservation practitioners that connect outward, toward the finance, operations, capital planning, legal, and government relations areas of our organizations. Growing preventive conservation may focus on multiple stewardship models to staffing preventive care, each with their own strengths.