AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Preventive conservation in its ideal form is an integrated part of every position in a cultural heritage institution, with the preventive conservator as a spider in the web of daily activities throughout the organization.

Established in 1958, University of Arizona Libraries Special Collections holds over eight miles of book, archival, photo, architecture and map collections with a focus on Literature, History of Science, Political Affairs, Performing Arts, the University of Arizona, Arizona and the Southwest, Arizona Queer Archives, and the US-Mexican Borderlands. I joined this department in 2022, with the intention to start a more comprehensive preservation program for these collections. Starting a new program to preserve these impressive collections, covering a wide variety of materials, provides great challenges, ranging from developing item-level solutions to departmental-wide rethinking of roles and responsibilities.

During the first year, we established a preservation studio where a Preventive Conservator, a Preservation Assistant and two student employees work on minor treatments and enclosures for collection items and exhibition production. We expanded the climate monitoring program, starting monitoring light-levels around the building, and established an IPM program that includes raising awareness among staff of the importance of IPM practice. Together with a library conservation consultant and colleagues across the libraries and campus, we created a report on preservation-focused space planning. This will help Special Collections plan for growth space and an improved preservation environment in the near and further future.

We started a training and outreach program for staff, student employees, and community groups, and are establishing new exhibition production procedures, which are tested in small-scale pop-up displays curated by students throughout the year. In collaboration with student employees and interns, we conducted a survey and measurement of the extent, materiality and storage conditions of all collections, and started a box-level survey of processed archival materials to identify collection and furniture needs and potential improvements in processing. A digital production lab is soon to open next to the preservation studio, and processes and responsibilities to integrate preservation work in digitization processes are being developed. Some early identified high priorities are in progress, such as the development of an emergency plan in collaboration with other University of Arizona Libraries, and establishing a new exhibition manual in collaboration with Special Collections librarians.

This presentation reviews the efforts that were already in place and how I mapped out priorities starting this position and program, consulting various stakeholders within the libraries and building on a preservation survey executed by a conservation consultant in 2019. I reflect on what we have achieved so far, what our challenges have been, what I would do differently looking back, and where we plan to go from here. Establishing a new program and making preservation a consistent part of everyone’s work around the department takes time and requires consistency, patience and flexibility, and the planting and nurturing of many seeds.