Our Monthly Member Meetup is a series of hour-long monthly events that we’ll host second Fridays at 2pm ET. Topics may cover sustainability, private practice, volunteering, the wiki, emergency planning, introductions to our various committees and groups, and more. Our goal is to offer you a social outlet and way to connect with other members. We welcome suggestions for topics and guest hosts! Send us your ideas at [email protected]. 

Review our past meetups:

• 2025 Member Meetup Series
• 2024 Member Meetup Series

Join us for a webinar with Donald Friedman, PE, on disaster preparedness and recovery for historic buildings and those who care for them. Learn how structural engineers, specialized contractors and other responders assess damage, define priorities, and hand off critical information to building owners and stewards. Through a real-world case study, we’ll discuss how building and collection stewards can prepare for emergency response, recognize when professional support is needed, advocate for their structures, identify what can be handled safely in-house and plan effective short-term stabilization.

November 10, 13, 16, 20, 2026, at 1-2pm ET
Speakers: Jennifer Daly, Lisa Goldberg, Lucy Midelfort, Lisa Worley
Coordinator: Kelly McCauley Krish

Join us for this online series of four webinars, exploring practices around the preservation of movable collections on display and in storage in historic house museums.

• Session 1: Primer on architectural preservation (Midelfort, November 10) - This introduction will give professionals working with movable collections in historic houses a foundational understanding of the components, functions, and risks to the building structure, along with basic guidance on how to maintain it.
• Session 2: Assessing and mitigating risks (Goldberg, November 13)- Drawing on decades of experience surveying historic houses, Goldberg will talk about how to identify issues, how to communicate risk when onsite, and methods for addressing these risks, as well as potential successes and limitations for solutions to identified issues. 
• Session 3: Practical approaches to implementation (Daly, November 16)- Using a large historic estate as an example, Daly will share how she has balanced interpretation and preservation of collections in an historic house. 
• Session 4: New horizons (Worley, November 20)- From her work at Ford House and developing master plans as well as serving with AASLH, Worley will discuss current and upcoming challenges and opportunities for house museums, and where participants can both get support and contribute to discussions.

Registration to participate is free and includes access to all four session. You do not need to attend all sessions to participate. The sessions will take place in Zoom and automated captions will be available. The session will be recorded and recordings will be available to registrants.

Recordings from the 2025 Handling and Maintenance of Historic House Collections webinars can be found here.

Funding for this program comes from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support comes from the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC) Endowment for Professional Development, which was also created by a grant from the Mellon Foundation and is supported by donations from members of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) and its friends. Programs are made possible with the assistance of many AIC members, but no AIC membership dues were used to create or present this webinar series.

As a student or beginning professional in conservation, you are or have been exposed to the many concepts in conservation ethics in many ways in the form of lectures, discussion groups, workshops and practice conservation studio experience. You have become aware that issues such as minimal treatment, original appearance, respect for an object, retouching, and value are subject to often heated debate, but that thinking about conservation ethics is also in a constant state of flux. However, in the pressure of training curricula, it is difficult to find the time to reflect on what you have learned and experienced without feeling like you are being judged by your colleagues or the faculty.

In order to provide free space for you to think about your future role in conservation, the AIC is offering a series of so-called Socratic dialogues to help you reflect on a number of important issues in conservation and conservation ethics.  The Socratic method developed in modern times by the German philosophy, Leonard Nelson, is an excellent, proven method for such reflections. It is a structured form of dialogue in which all participants actively contribute. The purpose of the dialogue is not to solve the question or controversies at hand with respect to issues in conservation and conservation ethics, but to investigate and understand each other’s experience, opinions and concerns. The Socratic method provides a safe, open environment for participants to investigate what the essence behind these issues is, to understand their own points of view as well as those of others, and how this understanding might help them in making conservation decisions in the future.

The Socratic dialogue series will consist of five dialogues spread over two calendar years. You may attend one or all!

Each dialogue will be conducted in English. Depending on the particular format, the dialogues will last between two and three hours and will be conducted on-line. 

Moderator: Dr. W. (Bill) Wei, FIIC

Dr. Wei (1955) is a senior conservation scientist (retired) in the Cultural Heritage Laboratory of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE). He conducts research into the effects of cleaning and treatments of objects on their appearance and viewers’ perception, as well as the effect of vibrations and mechanical stresses on the condition of fragile works of art and cultural heritage.

A major area of interest is how conservation decisions are influenced by the differing perception of objects by art historians, conservation scientists, conservators, curators, directors, and other collections staff. Dr. Wei has trained as a Socratic dialogue moderator and has organized over 70 dialogues over the past fifteen years, including dialogues at the previous seven AIC annual meetings (2013-2021) on “value”, “museum climate”, “certification”, “disaster planning”, "high-tech innovation", “public participation” “color”, “objectivity, subjectivity and taste in conservation decision-making”, “systematic racism in conservation” and “authenticity and originality”, a dialogue on the rights of living artists at the ICOM-CC meeting in 2014 and at the ICOM-CC Legal Issues working group meeting in 2016, and dialogues for various museums, cultural heritage institutes, universities, and smaller groups of conservators in different countries on conservation ethics, cleaning of historic church interiors, digitalization, photograph conservation, the value of archaeological work, and the subject of dust in museums.

Audience and Registration

This conversations is intended for students or emerging professionals in the conservation field, be it active conservation or related fields such as preventive conservation or conservation science. Registration for this workshop is free, but limited to 48 people. All of the workshops will be conducted on-line using a platform known as Moodle. To allow for Moodle set-up, registration will close Monday, Nov. 2.

Revisiting Wood Identification: Part I

Live lecture: October 30, 2026, at 12pm ET

Intended for collections professionals with a baseline knowledge of wood anatomy, this lecture, given jointly by Arlen Heginbotham (Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, the J. Paul Getty Museum) and Randy Wilkinson (Principal Conservator, Fallon and Wilkinson LLC), will reinforce the importance of microscopic anatomical analysis as the predominant wood identification technique. Topics will include setting up a successful thinking framework for wood identification, reviewing the best available resources with which to compare your samples, and presenting options for when you’ve hit the inherent limitations of this technique. The current research into other instrumental techniques being explored for wood identification will also be reviewed. 

Revisiting Wood Identification: Part II 

Live lecture: Time/Date TBA

The second part of this series will serve as a practical exploration of much of the theory discussed in Part I, with our speakers each demonstrating their workflow from taking a successful sample to navigating the previously mentioned resources. 

Registration includes both lectures and access to the recordings after the live events.

Insurance planning should be part of your emergency response plan. A critical factor to consider is how you'll pay for the services you need to recover. During this presentation, we'll cover the types of insurance policies available, including building, collections, general liability, extra expense, and business interruption. We will also cover what the policies typically include and what they don't. You will develop an understanding of how insurance transactions work and how to make them work for you, including a review of a typical contract and review of the terms. We will discuss working with your insurance agent to ensure you get the best advice and support. If insurance is your means of recovering from a disaster, then a basic understanding of how it works is essential. The instructor will include examples and case studies. 

Join the AIC Sustainability Committee on October 14, 2026 at 12:00 pm EST as Laura Lupton, founder of Field Forms, discusses the opportunities exhibitions offer for piloting dynamic environmental control following the BIZOT Green Protocol. The climate crisis is upon us, and cultural organizations bear a responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The 2023 Bizot Green Protocol refresh calls for cultural organizations to rethink exhibition and loan practices to reduce GHG emissions. As cultural heritage organizations consider adopting the BIZOT Green Protocol, exhibitions offer opportunities to pilot updated conditions by thoughtfully strategizing checklists and loan agreements. Lupton has worked with several museums to successfully plan exhibitions that allow for wider temperature and relative humidity set points that are more energy efficient, both saving money and reducing emissions. 

Join the AIC Architectural Specialty Group (ASG) and the APTI Delaware Valley Chapter for Conservators in a Global Context, a joint webinar series exploring architectural conservation practice around the world. Learn from leading conservators, architects, and other heritage professionals as they share diverse perspectives, approaches, and experiences from around the world.

The series kicks off on September 23rd at 12:00 PM US/EST with Shixin Zhao presenting on “Understanding Change: New Ways to Assess Climate Risk for Cultural Heritage.”  

Stay tuned for subsequent speakers and dates, which will be announced across AIC/ASG community pages and APTI-DVC email lists and social media channels. 

Members of AIC/ASG or APT-DVC get free access to this webinar series! Non-members can join for $10 for each webinar.

The passcode for Zoom is j_9?_B_vDS

Shutting down a private practice is a topic that all conservation professionals will face, whether they are shifting to employment in an institution, scaling back to make room for life issues that pull on their time or simply retiring at the end of a long career. Some have small practices that are just them and their workbenches and some have obligations to employees and landlords. For all conservation professionals, the questions surrounding how to gracefully and responsibly shut down a business can be complicated. 

The first webinar in the series will focus on legal issues surrounding the disposal of business entities as well as property. We are pleased to have as our speaker Karl Means, an attorney in the Washington, DC area who is a member of the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts (WALA) and specializes in this topic.

This webinar is free to AIC members.

Sunsetting was not part of the Software Preservation Network’s founding conversation. Organizations are built to last — or at least that's the implicit assumption baked into most strategic plans, member recruitment pitches, and grant applications. But what happens when an organization has done what it set out to do? Or when the ecosystem has shifted in ways that make continuation less meaningful than closure? Or when the honest answer is that the energy, resources, and community trust carried by an organization would do more good somewhere else?

This is the account of an organization at the end of its lifecycle, and how we’re embracing this final act and working to preserve everything worth keeping. Through this presentation, we hope to communicate the importance of developing a sunsetting strategy, share strategies for composting resources to bring new life to the work in the future, and how we're still working towards community development as we close down operations.

Join Chelle Sanders and their work to facilitate a graceful transition.