Sharing Knowledge in Art Conservation: From Repository Building to Research Publishing

As contemporary art makes its way into museum collections, knowledge sharing between organisations is important for developing a common frame of reference and identifying best practices in an evolving field, but is hampered by ethical, legal and technical complexities. In this article, I ask how constraints to knowledge and documentation sharing between institutions can be overcome. Over the past decades, there have been a number of initiatives for the inter-institutional exchange of documentation and research materials on the conservation of contemporary art. I focus on an online database project created by the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA) to share conservation documentation among practitioners in a semi-public setting. The main success of the INCCA database appears to have been to provide access to templates of forms and reports used in emerging practice, and to enable networking and increased exchange between members. I further identify the network as a research-based initiative and recognise its role in consolidating the conservation of contemporary art as a discipline. I conclude that this shift has precipitated the movement of knowledge exchange away from the circulation of data in the network to publicly oriented knowledge production.