Safe house

Natural History, Feb, 2006 by Mary Knight

Would you trust your beloved heirlooms to an institution that could not ensure their safety or whose environmental conditions were hazardous to their survival? Presumably not. Yet according to a recent study by Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit conservation group based in Washington, D.C., that's precisely what many institutions are asking the public to do with some of the nation's most precious art, historical artifacts, and scientific specimens.

Heritage Preservation examined the "health" of U.S. archives, libraries, and museums--some 30,000 institutions in all--and found that 26 percent of them cannot protect their collections against damage from inappropriate humidity, light, and temperature. Even more alarming, the group learned, only 2 percent of the total annual operating budgets of all collecting institutions is dedicated to conservation. And in the event of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, only 20 percent of institutions have an emergency plan to protect their collections.

For fans of natural history, however, the news is not entirely bleak. Large institutions, which hold 88 percent of the nation's 820 million scientific specimens, are better prepared. New York's American Museum of Natural History, for instance, has permanent staff dedicated to collections management and a small army of volunteers; moreover, it is working toward a comprehensive emergency plan for all its collections. "We have been working hard--even before 9/11--toward preserving and assessing the needs of our collections in a strategic way," notes Merrily Sterns, the museum's senior director of federal programs. "Despite limited funds, over the past decade we have allocated increasing resources to collections management, preservation, and security. But the needs are great."

The fact that "federal funding is extremely scarce to almost nonexistent for collections protection," Sterns adds, should sound alarm bells throughout all U.S. museums. That funding is especially critical for small natural history museums, which cannot bear the costs of needed conservation staff and expertise alone. (www.heritage preservation.org/HHI/full.html)