12 January. The Field Project 'Teamwork for Sustainable Collections Care', the first field project of the CollAsia 2010 programme, opened on January 8 in Ha Noi, Viet Nam. The Vice Minister of Culture of Viet Nam, Hon. Tran Chien Thang, made the opening speech.

The project team is composed of senior staff members from ICCROM and SEAMEO-SPAFA, as well as consultants and senior professionals from institutions such as the National Museum of Vietnamese History, the Viet Nam Museum of Ethnology, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Netherlands, the National Museum of Laos, National Museum of Malaysia and the National Museum of the Philippines, the University of Culture in Ha Noi and the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

The 15 participants come from Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam.

The aim of this project is to build capacity among Southeast Asian museum professionals to improve how the collections in their home institutions are conserved. Emphasis will be given to the crucial role of teamwork in effectively planning and carrying out such improvements, taking storage concerns as a practical example.

The focus will then turn to the fundamentals of project planning and collections assessment. Using the collections of the National Museum of Vietnamese History (NMVH), participants will explore the nature of the collections held, how the collections are used, and how they relate to the space that contains them. At the end of this week, participants should have a preliminary idea of how the conservation conditions of the NMVH collections could be improved.

Module 2: knowing your collections and preparing for change
Building on the general overview of the NMVH collections carried out during the first week, participants will discuss specific themes such as documentation, preventive conservation, storage materials and methods, identifying risks, disaster preparedness, moving and handling of collections, assessing storage space, choosing furniture, and making cost estimates. A number of practical exercises will be organized to illustrate each of these themes. The aim is to reinforce the participants’ theoretical and practical skills in each of these areas.

During this week, the group will spend two days at the Viet Nam Museum of Ethnology to discuss conservation issues in the context of the museum’s plans to build a new annex.

Module 3: from ideas to action
During this phase of the project, participants will finalize a plan for the actual improvements to be carried out at a selected storage facility of the NMVH. They will work in teams with defined responsibilities to implement the above plan.

Module 4: reaching the goal
The final phase of the project completes the implementation of the plan devised by the project team and participants. During this phase, the group will carry out the proposed improvements, which aim to make durable positive changes. The results will usefully inform future conservation actions undertaken by the staff of the NMVH as well as by the participants upon returning to their home institutions.

At the end of this module, the experience of the project will be discussed with colleagues from the Vietnamese professional community, and time will be dedicated to discussing lessons learnt. The participants will also present their plans to improve conservation conditions in their home institutions and ways of reinforcing the CollAsia 2010 network of professionals.

Member States represented: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Chile, France, Laos, Malaysia, Netherlands, Philippines, Thailand, United States, Viet Nam

updated on: 24 November, 2007