During the last five years, the Museums and Art Conservation Program of the Mellon Foundation has sponsored a series of meetings about conservation documentation in art museums.  These meetings were directed at engaging conservators, conservation scientists and institutional decision makers with a number of policy issues related to the physical history and treatment of the works under their care, and the opportunities and challenges of providing broader access to such information as part of the growing online accessibility of museum collections.

After several smaller meetings that aired widely shared concerns and helped to form the agenda, a meeting was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006.  Museum directors, curators and conservators from US and UK institutions discussed a broad range of issues raised by the digitization of conservation documents, from institutional priorities and resource allocation to eventual online access.  A brief summary of the meeting can be found in an article by Angelica Rudenstine and Timothy Whalen published in the Summer 2006 Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter: “Conservation Documentation in Digital Form: a Dialogue about the Issues”.

In 2007 a second meeting, addressing the same issues and with comparable participation, was held at the British Museum and attended by representatives from more than a dozen EU museums. Continuity with the previous meeting in New York was provided by several US and UK participants. A brief summary of this meeting was published in the National Gallery’s Studies in Conservation, volume 52, 2007, by Ashok Roy, Susan Foister and Angelica Rudenstine, “Conservation Documentation in Digital Form: a Continuing Dialogue about the Issues”.

These meetings contributed significantly to a growing interest in the digital management of conservation information, and to an extension of information technology to support conservators.  Those particularly interested in institutional policy on access to this information should familiarize themselves with the ”Summary Dossiers” generated for the New York and London meetings of 2006-7.  Even as they were being written it seemed clear to those involved that more open access to information (and the need for better management) was on the right side of history.  And, as fully expected, those vendors that museums look to for the applications that manage information about their collections also took a renewed interest in addressing the need for support that has been historically underdeveloped for conservation.