Picking Favorites: Strategies for Determining Salvage Priorities

Okay, so there’s been an emergency. Which collections do you salvage first? Determining salvage priorities is a key component of any emergency planning process. All the available response guides, tools, and templates tell us that defining these priorities is important. But why? And how should we go about making those decisions? Should priorities be based on value to the collection? Condition? Vulnerability?

This webinar will explore those questions by presenting different strategies for determining salvage priorities both before and after an emergency: who should be involved, what questions need to be answered, and how priorities should be documented and presented.

About the Speaker:

Maddie Cooper, Associate Preventive Conservator

In her position as Preventive Conservator, Maddie works with both the Preservation Services and Conservation Departments to carry out preservation surveys and assessments for museums, libraries, archives, and community collections, and to work on treatment projects requiring preventive care.

Maddie has worked with a wide range of institutional and community collections. She held roles in conservation and collections at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and the Wolfsonian-FIU prior to specializing in preventive conservation in graduate school. Through her graduate career, she interned with the Disaster Research Center, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Midwest Art Conservation Center. Maddie holds an MS in Art Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, a BA in Chemistry from the University of Delaware, and a BA in Art Conservation with a minor in Art History from the University of Delaware.