Yesterday I described the working process of the Seminar, and how much I liked the format; today, now that we’ve adjourned, I have some preliminary results to share.

After hearing the final two plenary sessions this morning, each of the 5 working groups gave their presentations (Emergency Preparedness, Raising Awareness and Support, New Preservation Approaches, Education and Training, and Assessment and Planning). Though we tackled different issues, in the end, it was proved that all are interconnected.  In total, an impressive amount of good recommendations and positive ideas were presented. Many groups worked into the wee hours of the night to solidify them.

Here’s a small portion of my working group’s report that I share because it relates directly to blogs and social media applications.  Here is what we suggested for New Technologies in the field of Education & Training.

We recognise single, institution-owned portals for sharing conservation knowledge are not sustainable, and may not be desirable.  Crowd-sourced social networking technologies exist to share images, video and documents freely. We acknoledge both the potential and the need for critical evaluation for these technologies.

We recommend a pilot project to establish protocols for good practice.

I know it’s terribly unfair of me to just pull just that tidbit from our report and the rest of the reports, but I wanted to throw it for folks to consider right now and begin dreaming up what such a pilot project might be ….

In summarizing all of the information presented by the working groups, Vinod Daniel, from the Australian Museum in Sydney, said: “the plenary sessions were like the appetizers and the working groups were the main meal.” Clearly these presentations and the associated handouts will be the essential sustenance of Joyce Hill Stoner’s final report.

In addition to the reports, we collaboratively produced the Salzburg Declaration on the Conservation and Preservation of Cultural Heritage. If you click on the image below, you can have it as a PDF file. Please consider distributing it (electronically, of course).

By Richard McCoy, Associate Conservator of Objects and Variable Art

Indianapolis Museum of Art

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 6:11 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.