part 1 - Iccrom

MEASURING HERITAGE CONSERVATION PERFORMANCE
6th International Seminar on Urban Conservation
Preventive conservation aims to identify risks and
mitigate the causes of deterioration of cultural property,
avoiding high-impact interventions. To reach
these goals, it must be based on the development of
sound assessments, technologies involved, the environment
around them, and the causes of the deterioration
processes by addressing in a holistic way
sites, buildings and collections. The methodology
for making integrated conservation assessments
of buildings and collections was developed by the
Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), and improved
for the project ‘Collection in hot and humid climates’.
In the late 1990s it was consolidated in the
manual The Conservation Assessment: a Proposed
Model for Evaluating Museum Environmental
Management needs (Dardes, 1998). Organized by
Kathleen Dardes, GCI senior project specialist, this
publication proposes the integrated analysis of
macro-climate, building, collections and organizational
aspects that impact on their preservation.
In Brazil, the first experience of performing this
type of diagnosis occurred in the Sacred Art Museum
of Federal University of Bahia in 1998 from a partnership
between the Museum, the GCI, the Vitae
Foundation and the Centre for Conservation and
Furniture Restoration of Cultural Property, Federal
University of Minas Gerais (UFMG-CECOR). One
of the aims of this study was to test the adequacy of
the methodology of the GCI in Brazilian institutions.
The Sacred Art Museum comprises an important
collection formed by 17 th century buildings, which
housed the former Convent of St. Teresa of Avila,
and the collection of pieces of religious art from the
17 th to the 19 th century that originate from different
religious brotherhoods. The project sought to identify
the causes and agents of deterioration processes
of the building and collections, and set guidelines
for short, medium and long term improvement of
storage conditions on the whole.
Since the work of the Museum of Sacred Art, some
positive examples of applying this method of conservation
assessment made by Brazilian institutions
responsible for preservation of cultural artefacts
have shown the effectiveness of this tool.
Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa (FCRB), a public institution
under the Ministry of Culture based in Rio de
Janeiro, is responsible for preserving the memory
of the life and work of Rui Barbosa through custody,
preservation and dissemination of his patron
legacy: his home, furniture, library and archive
records. Since 1997 FCRB has been conducting a
long-term study to develop preventive strategies
for the conservation of movable and immovable
property under its stewardship, adopting the methodology
proposed by GCI as a base for the different
stages of assessment, understood by the staff as a
tool knowledge in the present and the future.
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), a public research
institution linked to the Ministry of Health, also
based in Rio de Janeiro, is responsible for the
preservation of an important collection related to
cultural heritage of health care, including historic
buildings, archival collections, photographs, bibliographic
material, and museum of biology. Given
the enormous diversity of cultural property under
its responsibility, the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz (COC),
one of the departments responsible for the preservation
of cultural heritage of this institution, in 2008
created a team of multiple professionals composed
of experts from several departments whose goal is
to design, organize and develop action plans for
implementation of preventive conservation. As a
result this group is developing the research project
‘Preventive conservation of collections maintained
by Casa de Oswaldo Cruz’, selected by a research editor
promoted by COC in 2009, and with estimated
completion in first half of 2011. The development
project has the support of FCRB, through a partnership
established between the institutions.
This article aims to present the development of this
research, demonstrating the importance of using
consistent tools to assess and record the various factors
that may impact on the conservation of cultural
property. The conservation assessment tools are
important not only for the definition of conservation
strategies, but also for monitoring the effectiveness
of those actions.
1. Characterization of the study object
Fiocruz was created in 1900 with the goal of fighting
the great problems present in the Brazilian public
health care system. Currently, its purpose is to
promote health and social development, to generate
and spread scientific and technological knowledge
and to be an agent for citizenship. Its headquarters
are in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the neighbour-
hood of Manguinhos, where the first buildings constructed
to house the institution’s activities remain
preserved and where collections of great importance
to Brazil’s national heritage are gathered.
The Casa de Oswaldo Cruz (COC) is the technicalscientific
unit of Fiocruz responsible for the preservation
of the institution’s memory. The heritage
Teixeira Coelho, A. M. & .C. S. Rodrigues de Carvalho. 2012. The conservation assessment as a tool for cultural heritage identification,
monitoring, and evaluation. In Zancheti, S. M. & K. Similä, eds. Measuring heritage conservation performance, pp. 82-89. Rome, ICCROM.
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