Stonehenge in England, with throngs of visitors in 1976. In 2000, the World Heritage Site Management Plan for Stonehenge was completed. The process of drawing up the plan was guided by the Stonehenge World Heritage Site Management Plan Group, composed of over 50 people and organizations with an interest in the site. In order to "return the monument to its natural landscape setting," the government recently endorsed a plan to put a portion of a nearby highway underground and to construct a visitor center two miles from the site. Photo: Kristin Kelly.

A Note From the Director

Preserving What Matters: Value-Led Planning for Cultural Heritage Sites
Looking after a heritage site would seem to be pretty straightforward, but in practice it is more complicated than it appears. These sites are not simply visitor attractions, there to provide a reasonable profit. What separates the management of heritage sites from other forms of property management is that its fundamental purpose should be to preserve the values ascribed to a site—be they aesthetic or historical or social. Protecting these values is what justifies a site's management in the first place.

Building Consensus, Creating a Vision: A Discussion about Site Management Planning
Discussion about Site Management Planning
To provide some insight into current challenges in site management planning, we asked Christina Cameron, director general of National Historic Sites at Parks Canada, and Carolina Castellanos, an archaeological conservator who has worked closely with Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, as well as others, to share their perspectives with us.

Heritage Management in Africa
The problem with many efforts to preserve and present cultural heritage in Africa seems to emanate from a failure to understand fully the cultural significance of the heritage and its value to local communities. A strategy to develop the heritage industry in Africa should reconcile the needs of the heritage and its environment with those of the general public. The future of conservation and heritage management in most African countries will depend on how much this management is viewed as enhancing the life and development of the area.

The Latin American Consortium
Last October, the Latin American Consortium—a network of preventive conservation educators that serves as a framework for various cooperative initiatives—marked its fourth anniversary. With this milestone, the Consortium, organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, began an important new phase in its development, as the GCI passed the management of the project over to the Graduate Studies Program in Visual Arts of the School of Fine Arts at Brazil's Federal University of Minas Gerais.

GCI News
Updates on Getty Conservation Institute projects, events, publications, and staff.

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