Conservation Treatments, Matting and Framing
The Henry Ford has one of the largest and most diverse collections in the nation. Our staff conservators have experience with treatments for a wide range of objects and materials, and for purposes from high-end formal exhibits to operational use in living history programs.Whether they are agricultural or industrial machines, historic clothing or textiles, furniture or decorative arts, motorized or horse-drawn vehicles, documents or photographs, household or scientific equipment, or unusual modern materials such as aluminum alloys or plastics, the staff at The Henry Ford has worked with them.

Our professional staff will work with you to understand the material needs of your collection items in the context of the program that they are being conserved for to develop a cost-effective treatment strategy tailored to the care of the object and the goals of your organization.

Conservation treatment services, archival framing and the preparation of artifacts for display are provided. Staff members are also available to provide general advice regarding the care, cleaning and conservation of artifacts.

Storage Design and Planning
The immense collection holdings of The Henry Ford have led its staff to adopt a broad preservation strategy of preventative conservation — an approach that focuses on the long-term well-being of the collection as a whole, rather than solely on treatments of individual items.The bulk of this work centers on collections storage and addressing environmental conditions, routine maintenance and cleaning, collection housing and support and other factors that affect the material well-being of collections items while in storage. The Henry Ford staff have worked with storage facilities ranging from state-of-the-art, purpose-built collections storage areas to converted offices, residences and industrial warehouses.We’ll help you make the most of your facilities, whether they are optimal or less than optimal.

Our staff will work with you to assess the storage needs of the collections, match collections with the best available environments, develop approaches to rehousing and support, design a layout to optimize space and establish monitoring and maintenance routines that will ensure the best possible conditions for your collections storage area.

Conservation Assessments and Surveys
Conservation assessments or condition surveys of all or part of your collection holdings are the basis for developing a long-range preservation plan for your organization. A good preservation plan will help ensure that your organization makes the best use of its precious resources – staff, financial or material – in addressing collection needs. Preservation plans are critical to the development of annual budgets and are often required by granting agencies.

In a general conservation survey, our conservators will look at your organization’s entire collection to broadly describe conditions, identify conservation problems and guide future preservation activity. A detailed conservation survey is an item-by-item examination of all or part of your organization’s collections. It will create a series of condition reports on individual items, the treatment priority and a proposed method and cost.

Grant Applications
Over the years, staff members have raised more than $2.7 million for the conservation and preservation needs of The Henry Ford through the successful completion of grant applications. We can provide assistance to your organizations in drafting conservation- and preservation-focused applications.

Grant application assistance can include identifying potential sources of funding, building and organizing a proposal, developing work plans and writing narratives.

Training Lectures and Workshops
Training lectures and workshops on a wide variety of conservation topics are available.Workshops are scheduled several times a year at The Henry Ford, and we also can work with you to hold a workshop at your site.

Offerings include Historic Housekeeping; Pest Control; Disaster Preparedness and Response; Artifact Handling; Packing and Shipping; Exhibit Consultation and Collection Care.

Detailed Condition Survey — Thousands of Film Negatives
A good detailed condition survey requires a systematic approach and long-term attention to detail. Minoo Larson, Senior Conservator, has directed an eight-year project that has assessed and rehoused more than 140,000 film negatives created by Ford Motor Company, dating from 1903.The negatives were in a variety of conditions, ranging from pristine to badly burned or deteriorated. For the project, a condition grading system was developed, as was a system for quickly determining the film base material. Regular work process reviews have helped to improve the efficiency of this work from year to year.

Historic Quilts — Preparing Collections for Exhibit
Textile Conservator Frances Faile conserved this quilt and 30 others for the very successful Quilting Genius exhibit in Henry Ford Museum® in 2004. Large textiles, such as quilts, present special exhibit challenges.Their size necessitates a good support system to distribute the weight evenly across the piece. In addition, the many different fabrics that make up a quilt each require special attention. All of the quilts were cleaned and fitted with Velcro hanging systems. Some of the quilts, including this one, required extensive repair and stabilization to protect degraded fabrics.

Crating and Artifact Shipments
Collections in transit present special risks for objects. A thorough assessment of the risks and a well-developed plan to address those risks are essential to ensuring safe travel for your collections. In 2004, Senior Objects Conservator Clara Deck planned and implemented a loan of more than 30 artifacts for a large Hollywood studio film premier. She developed cost estimates and transportation logistics for five trucks to carry all the materials, including cars, an 8,000-pound steam engine and an 1865 Concord Coach. She oversaw a team that traveled to California to install the exhibit and returned a month later to take it all down.

Working with Modern Materials and Unusual Systems — the Dymaxion HouseM
The 20th century saw the emergence of a wide range of new materials and experimental systems that have special preservation requirements. In 2001, Senior Objects Conservator, Clara Deck and her staff completed the three-year conservation of R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1946 aluminum Dymaxion House. Funded in part by an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, the project was directed by an architectural conservator and included consultation with metallurgists, civil engineers and other scientists.Today the house is one of our most popular Museum exhibits.

Historic Automobile Conservation and Operation
Museum collections which are operated as part of their presentation to the public have special preservation needs. Malcolm Collum, Senior Objects Conservator, has developed preservation techniques specifically for use on the vehicle collections of The Henry Ford, which operates a number of vehicles on a daily basis and exhibits many more. Balancing operational reliability with preservation and proper documentation is the big challenge with these vehicles. Preserving mechanical systems such as engines and drive trains in vehicles on exhibit presents equally tricky challenges.The outward appearance of the collection is important, but the preservation of the mechanical systems and interiors is of equal importance.

Grant Application Writing for New Collections Storage
Successful grants require clear objectives, a well-though-out plan of work and evidence that the organization can carry out the project, all presented in way that allows grant reviewers to quickly understand these points. The Preservation Management staff at The Henry Ford had the opportunity to move some of the Museum’s most environmentally sensitive collections into 9,000 square feet of new storage area with modern temperature and humidity control. Maximizing this opportunity required a plan that addressed the needs of the collections and their users on macro and micro levels. Led by Jim McCabe, Chief Collections Manager and Curator of Buildings, a team composed of staff from Collections Management, Conservation and Registrars worked with curators and other collections staff to assess the entire collection and determine which collections would most benefit from storage in the new facility.This assessment was the basis of a successful application to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided more than $405,000 to support the installation of new collections storage equipment.

Creating State-of-the-Art Storage for Our Most Sensitive Collections
Good collections storage addresses both the preservation needs of the collection items and the physical access needs of collections staff, scholars, and program developers.To develop a plan for new storage equipment in the Benson Ford Research Center®, Jim McCabe, Chief Collections Manager and Curator of Buildings, and Clara Deck, Senior Objects Conservator, conducted careful assessments of the housing needs of individual items, determined allocation of space per collection, visited numerous new installations, worked with many vendors and evaluated six complete bids.The final product had a transformational impact on the role of collections in our program development process.The new storage system provided substantially improved physical access to the collections, with almost all items visually accessible.The collections of The Henry Ford went from being an undifferentiated mass of objects in boxes to a visually stunning display of a wide range of artifacts and a driving force behind a new generation of experiences at The Henry Ford.

Preservation Training — Teaching the Hands that Hold Our Collections
Ensuring that the staff that deals directly with our collections is properly trained is the first step to a good collections care program. Presented by Conservators Minoo Larson, Fran Faile, Malcolm Collum, Clara Deck and Mary Fahey, The Henry Ford recently offered a workshop that directly addressed the hands-on issues of collections care.“Collections Care and Historic Housekeeping” focused on the basic care, cleaning and monitoring of collections and covered a wide variety of topics in one very busy day. Lectures included Cleaning and Historic Housekeeping;The Care of Textiles, Paper, Furniture and Metal Artifacts; Pest Control and Planning of Proper Storage and Display Methods.