AIC's 43rd Annual Meeting

Conservation, and perhaps especially preventive conservation, is widely accepted as being ‘good’. Indeed, it is reasonable to consider preventive conservation a ‘social good’. It contributes to retaining our material and cultural heritage which is an important form of social capital. The practice of preventive conservation should not, however, be misconstrued as directly generating a good. To be properly framed and conducted, preventive conservation must first be thought of as the prevention of specific harms and not as the generation of a general good. Although this may at first encounter seem an esoteric distinction, it is far from that. It is an essential difference for us to fully apprehend in order for preventive conservation to become pragmatic, or even to remain sustainable as a specialization. It is an essential practical philosophy for us to adopt. So what is the difference? Creating a good is open to all manner of approaches and to taking advantage of diverse opportunities. For example, educating the public, a general good, can be done through many channels, including exhibits, publications, social media, telecasts, co-marketing, and so, almost endlessly. In contrast, preventing a harm, such as theft of collection items, requires a careful analysis of pathways through which the harming agent can access the collection items and cause harm. In the creating good situation any one, or combination of a few, channels might lead to very successful outcomes. In contrast, in the harm prevention situation all pathways must be identified and removed or blocked. The creating good challenge can be met almost entirely through non-comprehensive, open thinking approaches. The preventing harm challenge requires both open thinking for comprehensive pathway identification and closed, analytical thinking for evaluating how pathways can be removed or blocked. Arguably, mistaking preventive conservation for a good creation activity has led to the difficulty in our field addressing the challenge of reducing energy costs, and hence collateral environmental damage, while continuing to preserve cultural property. A harm reduction approach requires careful identification and analysis of what departures from an ‘ideal environment’ might occur, with what frequencies or probabilities, and what consequences in terms of value loss to cultural property. Then realizing whether those consequences are significant relative to other, irreducible harms. Until we accept the need for that specific harm perspective, and commit to its adoption, many in our field may remain stuck in thinking that toleration of any departure from an ideal environment compromises their commitment to a ‘good’. This view does not argue against presenting preventive conservation as a good worthy of public involvement and support. It does argue that the approach to preventing harms to cultural property should be first and foremost understanding the nature of those harms and identifying most efficient means of reducing them. In some cases that may lead to directly promoting preventive conservation as a social good but in many cases it will lead to clearly focused, behind the scenes, interventions to eliminate specific problems.