part 1 - Iccrom

MEASURING HERITAGE CONSERVATION PERFORMANCE
6th International Seminar on Urban Conservation
and public health published between the 17 th and
20 th centuries. In the 1990s an air conditioning system
with chilled water and a rechargeable battery,
integrated with central air conditioning system of
the building, was installed to control humidity in
the collection area.
Figure 2. View of the Enthomological Collection’s storage
(Source: Departamento de Patrimônio Histórico/
COC/Fiocruz).
collection. In 2008 the restoration work of the Moorish
Pavilion’s front wing was completed, including
the construction of metal bookcases with sliding
files suitable for storage of wooden drawers where
the insects are stored in the collection (Figure 2).
A system with rubber seals was provided in each
module of the sliding files in order to ensure the
tightness of the seal. There is no climate control system
in the rooms occupied by the collection.
The Rare Books Section of the A. Overmeer Library
for Biomedical Sciences still occupies the rooms
originally designed to house the library of the
Oswaldo Cruz Institute, located on the 3 rd floor
of the Moorish Pavilion (Figure 3). The collection
is housed in a separate area of the lecture hall, and
contains a set of steel shelves on four floors installed
in 1913. Consisting of diverse publications (books,
journals, theses and pamphlets), the collection comprises
about 40,000 volumes of works in the areas
of natural history, the biological sciences, medicine
The museum collection housed in the exhibition
rooms of the pavilion is composed of various
objects related to the institution’s history and to
health in Brazil, including laboratory equipment,
furniture and works of art. The exhibition rooms
are also heated by the central air conditioning system.
In this case, the heating system (fan-coil heating)
was adopted to ensure human comfort in the
space, rather than to present a solution for humidity
control.
2. The methodology
Due to the great complexity involved in developing
strategies relating to preventive conservation,
interdisciplinarity is seen as one of the key to success
in this type of work. According to May Cassar
(2006), preventive conservation should be a shared
responsibility, requiring a great deal of interaction
between different types of professionals – conservators,
architects, engineers, archivists, librarians,
museum curators – who bring different experiences
and perspectives to identifying problems and proposing
solutions, avoiding duplication of efforts.
For the development of this research a team of
technicians from Fiocruz and from different units
with different backgrounds was created, supported
by the technical staff of the House of Rui Barbosa
Foundation. To diagnose the collections a consultant
specialist in collections conservation was also
hired.
The current state of cultural heritage, whether movable
or immovable, is the cumulative result of past
and current environmental conditions, the intrinsic
vulnerability of the materials, presence of factors
that promote decay, use, and the history of interventions
suffered. Thus, based on the methodology
for making conservation assessments proposed by
the GCI group, a work plan for the development of
research was defined by the team, comprising three
main stages: environmental monitoring of areas of
custody of the collections, making the conservation
assessments of collections and the building, and the
establishment of conservation strategies.
Figure 3. View of the Rare Books Collection’s storage
(Source: Departamento de Patrimônio Histórico/COC/
Fiocruz).
The methodology proposed by the GCI is not
specifically formatted for the evaluation of historic
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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