International Advisory Committee of Keepers of Public Collections of Graphic Art

XXVIth Conference

Warsaw, June 3–8, 2018
Hosting Institution – Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library
Dobra Street 56/66
PL 00-312 Warsaw


Conference Topics I: Security

Please note: it is not about providing secret solutions covered by professional secrecy, rather about general ideas or solutions tested in practice, sharing experiences and main problems, which are probably largely common to our collections, regardless of the institution in which they are located - this is our idea

  1. Security of museum and library collections (especially works on paper), conservation and restoration, protection and evacuation programmes in the cases of threats or emergencies, etc.;
  2. Are there any general programmes led and subsidised by the state? Or does the responsibility of protecting the collection and related expenses burden the budget of the collection owner, even if it is a public collection?
  3. Two ways of security/protection: daily way of protecting the collection (light, storage, furniture, way of making it available, digitisation, thieves, bio-protection - insects, fungi, etc.) and protection/security programme in the event of emergencies (floods, contamination, terrorist attack, construction disasters, natural disasters, war conflicts, etc.).
  4. Which protection and preservation methods are applied in your collections?
  5. Is the conservation and preservation department, if exists at your institution, involved in the development of such general protection programmes?
  6. Are there any special regulations for Print Rooms visitors, special services etc. in your institution?
  7. Do you provide workshops and staff training, foreign internships (e.g. EU programme Erasmus + dedicated for staff mobility) or domestic internships? If not, do you use external training offered by other organizations or entities? What results do you expect after internships and workshops? Which of the recommended organizations do you work with (e.g. ICOM, CERL, LIBER etc.)?
  8. How we can improve the security of our collections?
  9. What is absolutely necessary, and what is relative to our choice? Can we define the minimum standards that will be recommended for the graphic and drawing collection? Should these be our (International Advisory Commmittee) task?

Conference Topics II: Terminology and Methodology

As the second leading topic we would like to propose a wide range of terminology and methodology issues in relation to drawings and prints (related to many aspects).

  1. Do we speak the same language? It means the language of terminology in the field of graphics and drawings, which we use in our country. These are very important questions, and there is a lot of ambiguity even in our milieu.
  2. Terminology – historical use, meaning, interpretation, sources vs contemporary use and meaning
  3. Methodology and methods. Should we, as an advisory committee, specify, for example, the basic principles for the researching on drawings, graphic arts, volumes including prints or drawings, etc., a set of certain standards and principles that we recommend?
  4. What about catalogues of great monographic exhibitions or catalogue raisonné of collections? What principles of study (and is it really study, or should be study as a result of academic research?) should we apply and recommend? For example, currently the drawing collection catalogues contain a summary of the state of research (mostly) and are the result of a long-term research experience presenting various research methods and perspectives, and very often interdisciplinary cooperation, or combining the experience of academics, museologists and authorities in a specific research area.
  5. We are focusing on drawings, but what about the catalogues on print collections? In this field there has been a huge development of research and applied research methods.
  6. I believe there could be an interesting discussion on this subject. The creation of an online terminology dictionary in several languages could be initiated as a result of our discussion and determination of the needs of our millieu in this area. An informal (or formal) team composed of representatives of those collections who would like to take part in it has to be established (an ideal situation - representatives of different countries and languages: Dutch, German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Swedish?). The next step would be to develop rules and an online tool in which we will work. We could also try to apply for external financing of such an international project.

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