1. There seemed to be general agreement that the establishment of regional centres for conservation or collection care would be highly desirable. Such centres would provide both preventive and remedial services, an advisory service and a training role for regional museum staff. They might also serve for the production of surrogate material and one or more could possibly provide mass de-acidification.

2. Any such centres would need to be thoughtfully established, based on a firm business plan, so they can provide a viable, sustainable service for all museums in the regions. They must operate on a cost-recovery basis, and should have the capacity for use by private practitioners. The services previously provided as an adjunct to the AMCs were on the whole not so established, and thus not viable without on-going public subsidy.

3. Although we only discussed the needs of museums, any such services would sensibly and cost-effectively embrace all three domains.

4. There is a clear need to improve the provision of conservation services, both for remedial and for preventive work. Now that there are no AMC conservators employed in England - and even when there were, the situation was far from ideal - it is apparent that museums are wholly reliant on private practices, and if they cannot afford their service they do without, even to the extent of no longer having anywhere to turn for even the most basic collection care advice. In addition to the demise of AMC conservation services, there has been an erosion of specialist posts in museums, including conservation. While the private sector has been able to step into the gap to some extent, the greatest loss is in the continuity of knowledge of collections and their particular conditions, any expert advice, and any sense of oversight of the needs and services required in the regions, as well as a lack of support for the conservation posts in regional museums. The net effect is undoubtedly a negative impact on the condition and quality of care of regional collections.

5. The siting of such centres should be flexibly considered. It may be that a large regional museum perhaps with its own pre-existing conservation facilities, would form the focus of a regional service. In other cases, a new free-standing facility may be required. If so, reasonable proximity to a major collection and curatorial expertise is essential. It may be that a "centre" could be a partnership. An obvious candidate, for instance, might be Bristol City Museum working with the Wiltshire conservation Centre in Bristol. They might well be associated with regional stores.

6. Before any such solution is pursued, it is essential that thorough analysis of needs is undertaken. As in many other areas of museum work, there is a paucity of data. A regional needs analysis should be based on a sample of collections and collection types, possibly using the methodology recently pioneered by the British Library (A model for assessing preservation needs in Libraries) and the Condition Methodology project under way in Wiltshire. The results need to be mapped against those materials or object types for which there is already good conservation provision in the private sector (e.g. using the data in the Conservation Register), and those others where provision is patchy or non-existent.

7. Such needs analysis would also sensibly be mapped against the provision of skills. There are some well- known gaps in conservation expertise which need to be addressed - e.g. natural history, books, photographs, museum archives, industrial and transport, musical instruments, scientific instruments - but a thorough analysis is called for.

8. Underlying the provision of conservation services, whether those of conservation centres or not, there is an urgent need for agreed formats, structures, benchmarks of level of conservation service, e.g. what are the minimum and optimum requirements for a conservation intervention, the basic standards for preventive care for each material or object type. Resource's forthcoming Benchmarks in Collection Care may be relevant here. English Heritage has already done important work in this standards-based approach, and the Society of Archivists is working on similar lines. Such service criteria could be best drawn up by the conservation profession, with suitable funding.

9. Reference was made to Power of Place This seminal report, requested by DCMS and DETR and carried out by English Heritage, focuses on the importance society attaches to the preservation of the built and natural environments. The evidence (including a Mori poll) is that people care very much about their buildings, that these are central to a sense of civilised life, operating at many levels and affecting all sectors of society. The report espouses a thoughtful and reflective approach to the preservation of the built heritage, not the mindless preservation of everything, but focussing resources in a measured way on what is important. The work of the Regional Museums Task Force offers an opportunity to place the preservation of the moveable heritage similarly at the centre of its regional stewardship strategy. It is well established that people value the objects which they own, and which are held by museums and galleries on their behalf, and not just those who actually visit to see them. They wish to know that their heritage is well cared for, and are prepared to have their taxes spent to ensure this. They no more want public collections to fall into disrepair out of sight than they wish to see buildings decaying more visibly around them. The aim is to ensure the sustainability of cultural heritage.

10. The work of conservator-restorers offers three opportunities for enhancing access:

(i) By ensuring the preservation of objects, they ensure access for present and future generations. Conservation ensures that collections are maintained, whether in store or on display, in optimum condition, failing which access has to be denied or limited. (e.g. a greater incidence of "do not touch" or worse prohibitions). Conservation know-how is also essential to the safe display of objects on exhibition, and with the greater emphasis on lively, changing and innovative displays, the requirement is for robustness of objects and for conservation to exhibition standard, on ever decreasing time-scales.

(ii) When conservator-restorers work on objects, they use techniques of investigation and bring to bear their wide-ranging knowledge so as to reveal the information hidden within each object, to explore its technological origins, and history, the creative processes that went into its production, the cultural context of its manufacture, and very often signs of its usage over the centuries. Conservators are in effect revealing stories about the objects which have enormous potential to enlighten and enthuse visitors, to provide them with wider insights, in short to educate and to enhance the qualities of their access. A classic example this approach is the highly popular series of exhibitions Art in the Making held over the years at the National Gallery. While the work of regional conservators need not result in exhibitions as such, nor would it necessarily be focussed on "high art", their findings can contribute richly to the permanent and temporary exhibitions in regional museums.

(iii) The very processes of conservation are of enormous interest to the public. There is a lot of evidence to support this. The work provides an alternative perspective for visitors, that demonstrates how deeper insights into otherwise static objects can be revealed; and shows tangibly how public funding on preservation is being applied. There is a political benefit to bringing the back-of-house to the front. The Conservation Centre at Liverpool is a prime example of the success of this approach. The viewing gallery at the Textile Conservation Centre in Winchester is another. Any regional centres should make a feature of controlled or remote access to the process of conservation.

11. Private conservators are rarely able to give research sufficient priority. Regional conservation centres have an important role to play in taking forward research into improved processes, investigation of artefacts, equipment, materials and all aspects of collection care. Staff at the centres would be well placed to initiate research, but it is unlikely they could support dedicated research staff. There is however enormous research potential in some of the national institutions - e.g. the BM, the V & A, Tate - and they could be encouraged to provide dedicated research support to the regional centres. This would require part-funding of relevant staff in those national research laboratories. The conservation centres could also enter into partnerships with regional research centres, such as universities and specialist foci such as the Leather Conservation Centre in Northampton.

12. The best formula for sound stewardship is to ensure sound expertise on site in each museum. While the regional conservation centres reduce the need to have in-house conservation staff to the same extent, all museum staff - curators, registrars, collection managers, attendants, etc - require training and development in aspects of collection care, and this can be made a requirement of the regional conservation centres.

13. The quality of collection care available for museum collections is dependent on the quality of conservation skills. There has been a marked improvement in the last ten years in the services offered by private conservators. Nevertheless is it vital that museums are able to feel confident about the quality of conservation staff they employ or with whom they contract. Resource should make it a strategic objective to encourage recognition of high standards, and to do this by supporting the professional accreditation scheme, PACR, now being implemented.

14. Another way to ensure high standards is to encourage the use of practices which are listed on the Conservation Register. This national database of conservation practices, searchable on a regional basis, is an important tool developed over the last twelve years by MGC/Resource, and now operated by UKIC. It is in urgent need of further development, both in content and in access, and the funding of this work is thoroughly justified as part of a regional museum strategy.

15. Technologies promise enormous advances for museums. One potential benefit lies in ensuring a technological linkage between the work of conservation-restoration and users of museums. There are already good examples of video live and delayed links (e.g. Liverpool), but there is considerable potential for virtual imaging electronic replication, for computer generated static and moving images, on macro and micro scales, similar to those techniques which have been developed for visualisation in other sciences, such as medicine, astronomy and geology, for instance. As museum websites and Culture OnLine are developed, so ought the imagery on the objects in collections to be enhanced by the revelations of conservators. Tooling up selected conservation laboratories (possible the regional centres) to provide this kind of imagery would form part of a regional development strategy.

16. It is assumed that the outcome of the Regional Museums Task Force work will dovetail with the Stewardship Strategy now being developed.

David Leigh
Director