Care of Museum Objects

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As per the Statues of the General Assembly of the ICOM at Copenhagen, Museum is a non-profit making permanent institution in the services of the society and of its development and open to public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment. But, now a days, museums try to create a surplus for making the institutions sustainable. The most important duty of the museums is to preserve the collection they possess. An object qualifies to be a museum object, when it is documented in a museum. Because of lack of information and training on how to take care of the objects, museum objects cannot be cared for by museum personnel at their ideal level. Therefore, the Government Museum, Chennai in order to disseminate knowledge of conservation to the personnel in museums and allied institutions, started a course on Care of Museum Objects in 1974. In order to provide the study materials in the form of a book, the Curator and Co-ordinatior of the Course, Dr. V. Jeyaraj, along with the Retired Director of Museums, Thiru N. Harinarayana compiled papers from experts in the concerned field both in the museum and other institutions and made them available for publication in a book form entitled, "Care of Museum Objects" in 1995. Since the copies are exhausted, there was a demand for the book and therefore the book has been reprinted. This reprint has got photographs pertaining to conservation. I hope this book will be a guidebook for those who are engaged in the great task for conserving our past for posterity.

The Chemical Conservation and Research Laboratory of the Government Museum, Chennai is one of the pioneering conservation laboratories attached to museums in this country. This Laboratory has done a lot of conservation activities pertaining to the museum as well as outside its purview. There were many requests from outside organisations for training the staff in conservation. In order to disseminate its expertise, training was given to those who were working in museums on request. Since there were many requests from outside agencies, it was decided to start the training programme, entitled, Care of Museum Objects in 1974 by Thiru N. Harinarayana, the Curator of the Chemical Conservation Laboratory and the Co-author of the book. The course was well received and is being regularly conducted till date successfully. In order to facilitate learning of the subject during the course, a book on Care of Museum Objects was published by compiling the papers given by the experts who were the resource persons of the course. This book was published in 1995 by Mr. M. Ramu, I.A.S., Commissioner of Museums and the books were exhausted soon. There was a need for the reprinting of the book, as there was a great demand for the same. The Commissioner of Museums, Dr. R. Kannan, Ph. D., I.A.S. took special interest to reprint this book and I thank him for reprinting the book. I thank Mr. K. Lakshminarayanan, Assistant Director of Museums and Dr. C. Maheswaran, Curator for Education for reprinting the book. I also thank the staff members of the Laboratory, Mr. J.D. Jagannathan, Mr. P. Balachandramurugan and Mr. S. Sampth for their cooperation in bringing out this volume. I have revised some of the articles of mine and included photos.