Preservation of Natural History Wet Collections: Feedback and Prospects: Proceedings of a Conference at the French Natural History Museum, 5–7 December 2018

Abstract

EDITORIAL This special issue of Collection Forum provides exclusive coverage of contributions from the conference "Preservation of Natural History Wet Collections: Feedbacks and Prospects" held at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (MNHN) in Paris, 5-7 De-cember 2018 (pfc2018). This was the first international conference dedicated entirely to the care and management of fluid collections. The idea for the conference was born after the half-day workshop "Fluid Collections-Conservation Techniques" at the SPNHC conference in Berlin in 2016, when Véronique Rouchon, head of the Conservation Lab at the MNHN (Center for Research on Preservation, CRC), approached the presenters of the Berlin workshop, Julian Carter (National Museum Wales) and Dirk Neumann (Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB), Bavarian State Collection of Zoology). The Berlin workshop was the stimulus for subsequent analytical work carried out on historic museum objects at the MNHN, the results of which were presented during the pfc2018 meeting. The two main objectives of the pfc2018 conference were to bring together international practitioners to freely exchange ideas about the management of fluid collections and to identify key areas for future research. The conference attracted a diverse audience, from preparators to researchers and from curators to collection managers, representing general museums, university collections, and natural history and medical museums. In total, 135 people from 17 countries responded, mostly European but also including a few North American colleagues. The conference was preceded by a tour through some of the MNHN's fluid collections and then opened with a workshop on Best Practices for the Conservation of Fluid Collections , based on the current state of knowledge, by Dirk Neumann and Julian Carter. John Simmons (Museologica) presented the keynote lecture, "Rack, Rum, or Brandy-A Biochemical History of Fluid Preservation," followed by short presentations or longer lectures by 34 participants in three categories: (1) Management of the Collections, (2) Valorization of the Collections, and (3) Preservation of the Collections. The conference closed with a moderated discussion of some of the key points and issues.