Charting the Digital Landscape of the Conservation Profession Project
What digital tools and resources do conservators use and create? Who are the audiences for conservation content, and how can this content be delivered to these groups by digital means? What kinds of digital tools, resources and platforms will be needed as the profession continues to grow? These questions form the core of “Charting the Digital Landscape of the Conservation Profession,” a project FAIC undertook in 2014-2016.
With funding from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Getty Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation, FAIC investigated the digital landscape of the profession to better understand its breadth and complexity, and to identify areas critical to the community both now and into the future.
Project Director: Diane M. Zorich
Project Assistant: Ayesha Fuentes
Advisory Committee: Kenneth Hamma, Pamela Hatchfield, Eric Pourchot, Nancie Ravenel, Koven Smith, Eryl P. Wentworth, Bonnie Naugle
Final Report
In 2016, FAIC published the final report of the project Charting the Digital Landscape of the Conservation Profession: A Report to the Profession.
FAIC immediately began acting on several of the short-term and medium-term recommendations made in this report by bringing on Matt Morgan to become our Digital Strategies Advocate; he has convened a group to address digital competencies for conservators and begin the discussion to update AIC's Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice. FAIC and AIC are planning more efforts to realize the goals stated in the report.
Read the final report to learn more about planned actions and ideas for the conservation community.
Draft Report and Feedback
In Fall 2015, we asked for the thoughts and comments of AIC members while the report was still in draft form. We posted the draft of the Digital Landscape report on a special website within Conservation OnLine (CoOL) to collect paragraph-level comments. Though commenting is now closed, you can still read the draft report and comments at
https://resources.culturalheritage.org/comment.
Additional Resources
FAIC conducted a review of existing digital resources to provide a snapshot view of current websites, tools, databases, and other resources that contain conservation information or serve conservation purposes. You can find a summary of those resources in the report below.
FAIC initiated an online survey of digital resources in May 2014. You can find a summary of the results in the document Digital Landscape of the
Conservation Profession
Survey Summary with a full analysis in the document Charting the Digital Landscape of Conservation Survey Results (August 2014).
Forums
Forum #1 (AIC Annual Meeting)
FAIC held four presentations on May 31, 2014 in conjunction with the AIC's 42nd Annual Meeting in San Francisco, which we link to below. You can find an overview of the presentations and summary of the discussion by Kate Brugioni in the archived Conservators Converse blog.
Eric Pourchot (FAIC Institutional Advancement Director) gave an overview of the project and initial findings from the survey of conservators and collections care specialists about their use of digital resources.
Ken Hamma (Consultant and representative of the Mellon Foundation) discussed the Mellon Foundation’s efforts in the areas of conservation and digitization, the goals and directions of these efforts, and their relationship to the bigger picture of the digital humanities.
Nancie Ravenel (Conservator at the Shelburne Museum) provided an overview of key resources she uses as a conservator and talked about how her inability to easily access some resources (e.g., ARTstor; ILL) changes how she locates and navigates information.
David Bloom (Coordinator of VertNet, an NSF-funded collaborative project that makes biodiversity data freely available online) spoke about the importance and opportunities offered by data sharing and online collaboration. He addressed issues such as how to engage people to work together as a community when working on digital projects, interdisciplinary collaborations, and sustaining community efforts for these projects.
Forum #2, Harvard University
FAIC conducted a two-day forum September 11-12, 2014 at Harvard University with an invited panel. You can find a summary of the discussions below.
Forum #3 (Dallas Museum of Art)
FAIC conducted a two-day forum December 4-5, 2014 at the Dallas Museum of Art with an invited panel. You can find a summary of the discussion below.