Essays from the Seminar-Workshop on the Value Assessment of Museum Collections

About this publication

Essays from the Seminar-Workshop on the Value Assessment of Museum Collections includes texts about risk management experiences with natural disasters in museums, written by Isabel Medina-González, Daniel Castro Benítez, Veronica M. Bullock, Carolina Ossa, David Cohen Daza and Mario Omar Fernández Reguera, María Paola Rodríguez Prada, Vagner José Silva Carvalho, José Luiz Pedersoli Jr., Verónica Jeria, Vera Mangas, M. Cecilia Rodríguez M., Catalina Plazas, Ana Eduarte, Jorge Rolando García Perdigón, Tamara Landívar Villagomez, Eduardo Góchez, Beatriz Gonzalo Alconada, Fernando Moscoso Möller, Ernesto Martínez Bermúdez, Raúl Castro Zachrisson, Bertha Miriam Herrera Mejía, João Herdade and Andrea Castillo.

Summary

This trilingual publication serves as an additional contribution to this rich and complex theme of the value and significance of heritage collections, with a particular focus on museums and the Ibero-American context. It is a response to the growing interest and demand from the professional community for references on a subject that is still relatively unexplored and not systematically applied to manage collections, in spite of their fundamental importance.

The contributions compiled here were presented at the Workshop-Seminar on the Value Assessment of Museum Collections (Bogotá, Colombia, November 19-23, 2012) organized by Ibermuseums in partnership with the Organization of Ibero-American States (OEI) and the Getty Foundation. The objective of this meeting was to recognize and discuss the multifaceted nature and applications of the value and assessment of the significance of museum collections. The themes vary from fundamental concepts of «value» to the use of quantitative estimates of the fractional value (and their loss) for the purpose of risk management in museum collections, an important element of the Program for Museum Heritage at Risk, developed by Ibermuseums. The document also presents various approaches, methodologies and tools that are currently in use or being developed, along with case studies to illustrate their practical application.