The Art Conserver: How conservation professionals make use of online resources

This blog post accompanies the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network (ECPN)’s poster at AIC’s 41st Annual Meeting: The Art_Con<server>: How conservation professionals make use of online resources, which captured and analyzed preferences in our field regarding the creation and use of conservation information online. The content for the poster was generated based on a survey distributed to AIC members. In this survey, respondents were asked to rate their usage and preferences about various online resources. These resources are summarized in this post.

• AATA: This Getty-run site is “a comprehensive database of over 120,000 abstracts of literature related to the preservation and conservation of material cultural heritage”.
• AIC website: The American Institute for Conservation (AIC) website has resources for conservators and the public. These include academic journals, the member newsletter, and helpful guides.
• AIC Wiki: The AIC Wiki has sections for each of the specialty groups, drawing information from different resources, including the print conservation catalogs. This “platform allows for easy and timely collaborative editing and also provides much broader access to these resources, ensuring that innovative methods and materials are documented and widely disseminated to practicing conservators and conservation scientists.”
• American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Resource Center: Resources for museums include collections stewardship, financial stability, and marketing and public relations.
• Bibliographic Database of the Conservation Information Network (BCIN): One of the “most complete bibliographic resources for the conservation, preservation and restoration of cultural property”.
• Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) website: The CCI website includes many documents and links, including resources from other Canadian heritage organizations.
• CoOL: A centralized repository covering over twenty-five preservation and conservation topics.
• CoOL DistList archives: The Conservation DistList is an email distribution list and an interdisciplinary forum open to conservators, conservation scientists, curators, librarians, archivist, administrators, and others involved in the preservation of cultural property. The archives include posts dating back to 1987.
• Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) website: The GCI site includes an e-bulletin, digital collections, a large library of free PDF versions of GCI publications, and article and research databases.
• Google Scholar: Search for scholarly work in all disciplines.
• JSTOR: A digital library of academic journals.
• National Park Service (NPS) website: The NPS has handy Conserve-O-Grams, “short, focused leaflets about caring for museum objects, published in loose-leaf format”. They cover all of the various specialty groups, as well as disaster response and collection care.
• Wikipedia: A free encyclopedia that can be edited by the public.
• WorldCat: The largest network of library content and services, WorldCat allows the user to search for libraries all over the world.

Of course there are a large number of other very useful resources for our field. What resources do you find yourself referencing most often? Do you have an interesting resource to share? Please leave comments so that others can know about them.