Collection maintenance is an area of collections management that consists of the day-to-day hands on care of collections and cultural heritage. The primary goal of collections maintenance or preventive conservation is to prevent further decay of cultural heritage by ensuring proper storage and upkeep including performing regular housekeeping of the spaces and objects and monitoring and controlling storage and gallery environments. Collections maintenance is part of the risk management field of collections management. The professionals most involved with collections maintenance include collection managers, registrars, and archivists, depending on the size and scope of the institution. Collections maintenance takes place in two primary areas of the museum: storage areas and display areas.
Collection maintenance and its tasks all work as a means to continually observe the condition of collections and ensure they are properly maintained and cared for. Because museums and repositories are stewards of cultural property in the public trust, they have a "responsibility to provide reasonable care for the objects entrusted" to them. Museum's collections maintenance tasks can also involve assessing and implementing strategies to improve storage areas and containers while continuously monitoring environmental conditions that may affect objects.
The collections management policy of an institution should include sections that address storage, integrated pest management, conservation, record management and documentation, inventories, and risk management. These policy sections should guide the scope of collections maintenance and designate responsibilities with staff members. A Collections Management Policy is considered a core document meant to support Collections Stewardship Core Standards and may be updated periodically to reflect best practices best served for a museum's specific collection.
Agents of Deterioration
Agents of deterioration are forces which act upon materials and cause them to degrade over time. There are ten main agents of deterioration which should be monitored on a regular basis and guarded against as a part of collections maintenance. These are temperature, incorrect relative humidity, light, dust & pollutants, pests, physical force, theft & vandalism, fire, water, and custodial neglect. It is important to recognize the type of damage each agent may present as well as ways to mitigate harmful effects.
Environmental conditions are highly controllable in most indoor situations. They include the temperature, relative humidity, light levels present in a collection space on any given day, and contaminants. Some flexibility is naturally built into most collections when it comes to the temperature and humidity changes they can bear, allowing for conditions to vary somewhat in response to the outdoor environment of a location.
Two types of light offer potential decay to cultural heritage: ultraviolet (UV) light and visual light (light that can be perceived by the human eye). Although they can be affected simultaneously by removing light sources, reducing overall intensity, or increasing the distance between a light source and an object, best preventive practice treats these types of light separately due to their differences.
Contaminants can come in many forms including naturally occurring chemical breakdowns in certain compounds, particulate pollutants, and accidental human contamination. Protecting collections from contaminants can be as simple as creating barriers to prevent abuse or as complicated as taking preventive actions to protect an object from its own chemical breakdown.
Temperature
Temperature acts primarily in conjunction with relative humidity, but it can trigger damage in its own right. Extreme high temperature can cause structural damage to some materials; paint may become brittle in excessive heat and some plastics may soften or melt in the heat. "High temperatures also accelerate chemical and biological processes," which can lead to corrosion or embrittlement of material. Insects also thrive in warm environments, and so temperatures should be kept as "cool … as practicable in storage and display areas".