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 membership@culturalheritage.org. 

Review our past meetups:

• 2024 Member Meetup Series
• 2023 Member Meetup Series 
• 2022 Member Meetup Series.

Online, April 30 and May 7 at 1-4:30pm ET
Coordinator: JP Brown

Art in Transit 2.0 is delighted to announce a joint PACCIN/AIC workshop focused on the theory and practice of crating museum collections for transport. This 2-part webinar series is meant for emerging preparators, as well as registrars, conservators and museum professionals who would like to gain practical experience with packing. The workshop comprises two online sessions that will take place before an optional in-person component at the pre-session of the AIC Annual Meeting.

Register here if you wish to only participate in the online workshop sessions. If you wish to participate in the in-person workshop as well, you must register through the AIC Annual Meeting (which includes registration to both the online and in-person components of the workshop. Find more information about that here.

The first online session will cover damage from vibration and shock during road and air transit and strategies for preventing and minimizing short- and long-term damage, by calculating and designing appropriate padding strategies. This session will be led by Bob White and Dale Kronkright.

The second online session will focus on probable risks and practical approaches to packing and crating for transit. This session will be led by Chris Barber, JP Flick, Mark Wamaling, and T Ashley McGrew.

The live online sessions will take place in Zoom and automated captions will be available. The sessions will be recorded and the recordings will be available to registrants.

This workshop is supported in part by the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation (FAIC) Endowment for Professional Development, which was 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. Workshops are made possible with the assistance of many AIC members, but no AIC membership dues were used to create or present this course.

FAIC relies on your contributions to support these and its many other programs. Learn more about donating to the foundation.

Our Conservators in Private Practice group is pleased to announce that the focus of its next meet-up session will be on insurance.

We've partnered with Mary Pontillo from Risk Strategies, a fine arts insurance expert, to create a conservation-specific insurance guide for private practices, which will be available to all group members. She will she will introduce the guide, discuss key issues for private practitioners, and hold a Q&A at this meeting.

Additionally, the group will host a luncheon session at this year's annual meeting in Minneapolis on Friday, May 30th which will be a continuation of this topic.

We want to ensure the guide and presentation are as relevant as possible to group members, so please take this brief anonymous survey beforehand to make sure your specific questions and concerns are addressed. It should only take 5-10 minutes to complete. https://forms.gle/NPcH6WziZEMvA1sr8

Our Architecture Specialty Group will host a "town-hall" style meeting for all group members and officers. Agenda to be shared.

The Member Engagement Subcommittee is hosting another live member Zoom session on Wednesday, April 23, at 7pm ET/4pm PT for us to share our subjective, personal experiences with recent government changes. This session will bring members together to give us a moment to connect and share feelings and fears in a supportive environment. Many of us have been affected by layoffs, funding freezes, grant cancellations, and DEIA changes. 

We will share our own experiences and hear from others in a collegial environment. Susan Mathisen will join us once again to share her development and scenario planning insights. We can share concerns but also possible solutions and actions to support one another. We hope that connecting with other members in similar situations will be a comfort and help us strategize around funding, staffing, and next steps. 

Please join us for this sharing session held in the evening to accommodate those who can't attend during typical work hours. We will have ground rules to help keep the space kind; we hope sharing will create paths to collaborative support. This session will not be recorded. All members are welcome.

Sustainability initiatives are linked to cost-savings, reduced carbon footprints, improved community relationships, and future resilience, along with the opportunity to optimize the preservation of collections. Doing so can be critical for small and mid-sized institutions with substantially limited resources to survive and thrive going forward. However, the time and financial resources to develop such a plan have meant that these efforts have previously been limited to larger institutions. By adapting and applying what has been learned about sustainable preservation at larger institutions, the field can also more substantially address the need to meet sustainability goals.

The learning objectives for this course include: 
• become familiar with the tools and resources available to implement sustainable practices specifically in the cultural heritage field
• understand sustainability terms and practices, and how they can apply to collecting institutions
• begin assessing current institutional practices through a sustainability lens and realize how to develop this practice into an actionable plan

Course Schedule

Webinar 1: Thursday March 27, 2025 1-230pm ET Green Terms and Tools
Presenter: Lorraine Finch, Director, LFCP 
This introductory webinar will go over commonly used sustainability terms and metrics, and what resources are available to implement sustainable and resilient practices in the cultural heritage field.

Webinar 2: Tuesday April 1, 2025 1-230pm ET Examining current operations 
Presenter: Christopher Dunbrack, Associate Building Manager for The Metropolitan Museum of Art- Cloisters 
While focusing on identifying measures to reduce energy and carbon, this webinar will also explore ways of benchmarking and fundraising to support addressing these concerns.

Webinar 3: Thursday April 10, 2025 1-230pm ET Developing a Green Vision 
Presenter: Patrick Hamilton, Manager, Climate & Sustainability Initiatives
Division of Mission Infrastructure, Science Museum of Minnesota
This webinar will present the Science Museum of Minnesota’s approach to examining institutional practices through a sustainability lens as a case study, along with practical tips for other institutions learned from these experiences.

Webinar 4: Thursday April 17, 2025 1-230pm ET Creating a Plan 
Presenter: Lorraine Finch, Director, LFCP
In the final webinar, participants will learn how to "write a sustainability plan in an hour", which can then be  implemented at their institutions.

Course Coordinator: Kelly McCauley Krish, Preventive Conservator

Live captioning in English and Spanish is available. The program will be held using Zoom Meeting. 

Registration Fee
• $99 Early Bird through March 20, 2025
• $149 Regular Fee

Connecting to Collections Care courses are made possible in part by generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Join AIC for a virtual Advocacy 101 and walk through our Advocacy Toolkit with tips on how to take action, why federal funding for conservation is critical, what’s at risk if agencies are defunded, and FAIC programs that would be eliminated without federal funding. Also learn the conservation impact: get the stats, learn everyday advocacy, and discover partner organizations advocating for support, and more. 

Risk Assessments are one of the most important steps that heritage institutions can take in emergency and business continuity planning. The objective of this course is to enable participants from small to mid-size heritage institutions to undertake a risk assessment specific to their institution, enabling them to identify potential natural, traditional, made or non-traditional risks and evaluate their impact. Utilizing existing knowledge of their institution and its collections, programs and assets, participants evaluate hazards and risks based on information from the heritage field, the insurance industry, the commercial business resumption sector and government agencies. A recommended reading list/bibliography will be provided. 

At the completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Identify and understand the internal and external hazards likely to affect their institution (building, collections, people)
• Evaluate the likelihood of these hazards affecting their institution
• Rank these risks posed by these hazards through the lens of their institution’s key functions and program priorities
• Assess the likelihood and impact of these hazards on their institution’s buildings and collections
• Summarize this information and identify risk priorities using a Heritage Risk Assessment Matrix

Course Schedule

March 5, 2025 100-230pm ET Webinar One: Introduction 
In this session participants will review their institution’s key functions and asset vulnerabilities in order to identify the key programs and critical needs of their institution. A consideration of the relative importance of these areas leads into a discussion of how and for how long their institution could continue to operate if any these were impacted. Participants complete an assignment outlining the key functions and asset vulnerabilities of their heritage institution.

March 12, 2025 100-230pm ET Webinar Two: Identifying Hazards & Risks 
This session discusses the different types of hazards and outlines the differences between a hazard and a risk. Reference material and guidelines are provided to help participants identify potential hazards in their area, and discusses methods to determine the extent to which they pose a risk. Participants complete an assignment that identifies the hazards that could pose a risk to their institution.

March 19, 2025 100-230pm ET Webinar Three: Risk Impact 
This session evaluates the impact of hazards that participants have identified as posing a risk to their heritage institution. This module discusses the primary and secondary effects on your institution, its collection and assets, and its functioning. Participants complete a Risk Impact assignment using Hazard Trees to evaluate the impact of disruption of services and the loss of collections, assets, revenue, facilities, reputation and information on their institution.

April 2, 2025 100-230pm ET Webinar Four: Putting It All Together 
This module brings together the information created in the Self Study component of the previous modules to complete a Cultural Heritage Risk Assessment Spreadsheet specific to participants’ institutions. This information is transferred to an institution-specific Risk Assessment Matrix. Together, the Spreadsheet and the Matrix provide a risk assessment snapshot that enables participants to address and prepare for the most likely risks to their institutions. Although risks, hazards and institutional circumstances change from year to year, updating these documents through an annual review will enable participants to be prepared.   

Course Coordinator: Jane Dalley, Jane Dalley Heritage Consulting

Jane Dalley began her career as a student in the Conservation Department at the Royal Ontario Museum, trained as a bench conservator at the National Maritime Museum (UK), worked privately in Montreal, spent 12 years as Chief Conservator for the Manitoba Archives and 18 years as a provincial conservation advisor. She is currently a conservator with Parks Canada. Jane has been involved in disasters in museums and archives since early in her career, responding to small and large-scale disasters, organizing an annual spring flood watch and assisting museums with flood threats, dam failure and tornadoes. She recently completed a BSc (Honours) in Applied Disaster & Emergency Studies and has IICRC certification in Water Damage Restoration, Applied Microbial Remediation, Odour Control, Fire & Smoke Damage Restoration and Infrared Thermography. She enjoys applying her practical experience, training and academic studies to disaster situations and emergency management in the heritage sector.

Captioning in English and Spanish is available. The program will be held using Zoom Meeting. 

Registration Fee
• $99 Early Bird through February 21, 2025
• $149 Regular Fee

Connecting to Collections Care courses are made possible in part by generous support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

AIC's Paintings Specialty Group hosted an "Update on the Reformulating Beva 371 Project: A Virtual Discussion" on February 24, 2025. Panelists shared results from the multi-year Reformulating Beva 371 Project, headed by Chris McGlinchey and supported by the Getty Foundation via their Conserving Canvas initiative. The Project is focused on working with Conservator’s Products Company in the U.S. and Centro Trattamento Superfici (aka CTS) in Europe to make the optimized formulation commercially available.

The panelists reviewed the studies conducted on the traditional solvent-based version of the optimized formula, in comparison to the original and current blend. They also introduced two solvent-free forms: pre-blended pellets and an open-weave non-woven fabric of (at least) two different densities. 

• There was a long Q&A period that is included in the recording. 
• Presentation slides are available on the Handouts tab.

Note: The panellists are not receiving remuneration from the companies that commercialize Beva. The purpose of this virtual presentation is to provide information on the new formulation and answer related questions to aid conservators in their decisions-making.

All specialties are invited to participate. Join PSG to have the fee waived for this event!

AIC's Equity & Inclusion Committee is hosting its second talk in a series of conversational interviews with conservators and cultural caretakers advancing DEIA principles forward, changing the way we think about and practice cultural heritage preservation. Join us on February 21 at 12pm ET / 9am PT. 

Join members of the committee on Friday, February 21, for a conversation with Eric Hemenway, Director of the Repatriation, Archives, and Records department for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, on "More Collaboration, Better History: Working Together to Bring a Better Story Forward." 

We will discuss how a tribal historian works with various governments, institutions and organizations on creating historical narratives in public spaces. Focus will be what materials to include, or not include, as well as navigating difficult stories.

Free for members. All sessions will be recorded and available to AIC members and shared after the live session through the Equity and Inclusion in Conservation online community and the AIC Member Community.