Quantifying risk to heritage assets and the cost effectiveness of its reduction: Can we quantify the necessary judgements, or are we just gaming the analysis?

Stefan Michalski - Senior Conservation Scientist, Canadian Conservation Institute

8 March 2012, 6.15pm

JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

The Canadian Conservation Institute has begun to apply a risk management tool to collections that incorporates not only risk assessment, but also cost-benefit analysis of suggested options for risk reduction. And we are finding surprises. Ideas for the tool emerged over many years, but a formal method and software tool developed quickly as part of our partnership with ICCROM and the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE) for the course "Reducing Risks to Collections." In the most recent course, we expanded to built heritage and complex sites. Scepticism about the method always focuses on two issues: the unremitting uncertainty due to poor data for many risks of interest; and quantification of value. Quantifying risk, and the cost-effectiveness of its reduction, means quantifying relative loss of value. This talk will explore the strategies we have developed to address these issues, and the response of users.

Conservation Values, Conservation-Planning and Climate Change

Dr John Pendlebury, University of Newcastle

9 February 2012 , 6.15pm

JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

The desire to reduce carbon emissions and the desire to sustain historic buildings and environments are two powerful contemporary value-systems that are potentially in conflict with each other. It is through local governance and policy systems that much of the mediation between these values will take place, and in particular through the conservation-planning system. This paper will first consider conservation-planning as a values-based activity and seek to distinguish commonalities and differences with/from the wider family conservation family. It will then focus upon the relation between conservation values and the powerful emergent agenda of carbon-reduction through a number of planning case studies. Accepting that carbon control aims and heritage values both have legitimacy, there is a need to explore how these two forces might positively interact. We need to think about how we can come to love the heritage of carbon neutrality.

Science and Heritage five years on

Margaret Sharp, Baroness Sharp of Guildford, House of Lords

15 December 2011, 6.15pm

JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Five years ago in November 2006 the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee published its Report on Science and Heritage. This lecture looks back over developments in those five years, and reflects on how far the recommendations contained in that Report have been implemented, other actions that have followed from it and ponders on the future of science and heritage both in the UK and within the wider European context.

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Sustainability and Post-Digital Culture

Nick Poole, Chief Executive, Collections Trust

13 October, 6.15pm

Gavin de Beer Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building, UCL, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

As cultural organisations move beyond the first generation of Digital exploration, there is an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the need for integrated approaches which treat physical and digital Collections as a single, coherent offer. Future sustainability depends on tuning inputs (such as Digitisation, acquisition and loans) and management processes toward clearly-defined outputs which unify real and virtual platforms to meet the real needs of real consumers. This talk looks at the way in which future opportunity depends on looking back to the long tradition of existing practice in cultural institutions.