Preventive Care of Historic Photographic Prints and Negatives, Part II

Held March 15-19, 1993, at the GCI's Marina del Rey facility, this was a follow-up course for professionals who had already taken the GCI's first course on "Preventive Care of Historic Photographic Prints and Negatives."

Among the course topics were: identification, deterioration, and preservation of color photographic materials; film base deterioration and current preservation alternatives; the stability of silver images; recent environmental and storage parameters for all types of photographic materials; basic care of photographic materials; and long-term preservation concerns, disaster recovery plans, and surveying of collections.

The course's 19 participants included curators, conservators, archivists, and collections managers. Its principal instructors were Debbie Hess Norris, Assistant Director, Art Conservation Program, University of Delaware and Winterthur Museum; and James Reilly, Director, Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology. The assistant instructor was Deborah Derby, a private conservator based in Chestertown, Maryland.

Preventive Conservation: Museum Collections and Their Environment

The fifth offering of this annual GCI course took place in London on April 18-May 1, 1993. The course was offered in partnership with The Conservation Unit of the United Kingdom's Museums & Galleries Commission. Preventive conservation has been one of The Conservation Unit's principal areas of endeavors over the past several years.

The preventive conservation course focuses on the technical and organizational factors that affect implementation of preventive conservation, combining technical information on the museum environment with a review of strategies for working with colleagues and consultants to integrate preventive conservation into museum policies and operations. This was the first time the course was held outside the United States for participants from a specific region—in this case the United Kingdom, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Norway.