AIC's 44th Annual Meeting

This presentation will explore ways to achieve effective and timely integration of conservation science into conservation practice. Two key elements for ensuring maximum impact for conservation science are research conducted in a collaborative and transdisciplinary way and proper dissemination of results. Conservation science is an integral and essential part of conservation. It provides a sound basis for informing conservation activities, by expanding our understanding of the composition, aging and deterioration of heritage materials to better care for collections, by developing improved techniques for conservation treatments or by advising on the choice of conservation materials through testing and research. Technology is constantly progressing and advances in other scientific fields are soon applied to conservation science. Techniques that were once considered sophisticated and expensive, such as Raman spectroscopy and laser cleaning, are now routinely used. The sophisticated methods of today that are not easily accessible because of scarcity or cost may become part of the arsenal of conservation scientists in a few years. However, conservation science remains expensive, especially if one wants to take a leadership role in this field. Considering the many issues that need attention, an efficient approach is to join forces in research to find practical solutions to key issues, and to ensure that work carried out for one single institution ultimately benefits the entire community through effective sharing of knowledge. Drawing from the author’s professional experience in the context of the Canadian Conservation Institute and her knowledge of the profession, examples of work carried out on different types of objects will be used to show how research projects are designed to maximise benefits so that conclusions are applicable to other objects or collections, and how projects undertaken to answer a specific question from a single museum can generate data that, once compiled, can provide a wealth of information to the broader museum community. The presentation will also discuss strategies to involve stakeholders in defining research objectives and methodologies and to ensure active collaboration with the communities using the research results.