The 500-level Preventive Conservation Seminar is offered at NIU's Naperville campus on Saturdays. This allows the Museum Studies Program to not only serve current students better, but also reach out to prospective students and area museum professionals as well.
The objective is to introduce new and current museum professionals to preventive conservation as a holistic doctrine for the 21st century museum environment. Through lecture and discussion, the course will focus on the necessity for museums to adopt the preventive conservation doctrine, address preventive conservation strategies for the areas outlined below, and discuss approaches to permanently and positively involve all museum workers in the process.
The preventive conservation doctrine provides the underpinning for the museum's primary purpose: ensuring its collections are available for current and future generations. The benefits of preventive conservation are long-term and not always immediately obvious. In spite of this delayed benefit, it is imperative museums implement preventive conservation practices now in order to be responsible stewards for the collections they hold. These strategies need to be planned, financed, and executed to provide the best possible care at the present time. With shrinking budgets, rising costs associated with increasingly high-tech conservation work, and increased competition for conservation grants, implementing preventive conservation provides the most cost-effective means for museums to preserve their collections for future generations.
In order to be effective, preventive conservation must involve everyone working (and volunteering) for the museum. Most preventive conservation involves common sense, good housekeeping practices, and effective communication. All areas of conservation are connected, so that improvements in one area have a positive effect on others. These areas are covered in the course:
In addition, we will hold a practical session on designing and building highly efficient security frames and shipping crates in-house. *Practical session will be held on the DeKalb campus in the School of Art woodshop.