It is with great sadness that ICCROM acknowledges the death of Dr. Roland Silva, former Director General of Archaeology of Sri Lanka and former President of ICOMOS International.

The first RE-ORG workshop in Spain was held in December 2019 at the Victor Balaguer Library-Museum in Vilanova i la Geltru in Catalonia. It was conducted in the framework of the preventive conservation strategy developed by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya for 2018-2021, which in particular, aims at improving storage areas of the 114 museums in Catalonia. In this context, in November 2019, the Generalitat de Catalunya entered into a collaboration agreement with ICCROM to develop the RE-ORG method in Catalonia's museums

The eighth international First Aid to Cultural Heritage in Times of Crisis (FAC) course concluded last week at ICCROM’s headquarters in Rome. The course brought together experts from several fields of expertise that included cultural heritage, disaster risk reduction, urban resilience, mediation, climate variability and humanitarian aid. Through the FAC training, they learned how to mitigate the disaster risks and prevent damage to cultural heritage in crisis situations and take the necessary steps to ensure early recovery post-crisis.

ICCROM is proud to announce the release of the Portuguese version of Endangered Heritage: Emergency Evacuation of Heritage Collections translated by the Grupo de Amigos do Museu Nacional dos Coches (GAMNAC), in collaboration with ICOM Portugal and ICOMOS Portugal. The project was coordinated by ICCROM Council Member Isabel Raposo de Magalhães, and is co-published by GAMNAC, ICCROM, and UNESCO.

The International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), through its Regional Office in Sharjah, UAE (ICCROM-Sharjah) joins efforts with the INTERPOL (the International Criminal Police Organization), in organizing an international training course on ‘First Aid to Cultural Heritage for Preventing Illicit Trafficking in times of Crisis’, with financial support from the Government of Sharjah and the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, in ICCROM-Sharjah Premises in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, from 8th to 19th December 2019.

ICCROM was present on 10 December at an event organized by the Embassy of Qatar in Rome, as part of a programme of celebrations being held to honour Qatar National Day (also known as 'Founder's Day').

In the frame of a long-term national program RE-ORG Serbia, the first in the series of workshops is going to be organized in the National museum in Kraljevo (central Serbia), from 2-7 December 2019. The host museum will welcome 11 colleagues from 5 museums from the surrounding region, who will during 6 days learn how to reorganize a storage according to the RE-ORG method and apply that knowledge in reorganizing archaeological storage of the National museum in Kraljevo.

Five months after the successful RE-ORG workshop that took place in the Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia (Muzej Novejše Zgodovine Slovenije) in Ljubljana, RE-ORG Slovenia moved to its second phase. From 22 to 24 October 2019, a group of 11 participants coming from seven Slovene museums met again for another RE-ORG workshop to review and implement the storage reorganization proposal that was made in May 2019, based on the RE-ORG method.

ICCROM, CCI and the Egyptian Heritage Rescue Foundation are pleased to offer the RE-ORG Method free download in two new languages, Italian and Arabic. More than 55 000 museums exist in the world, and typically 90% of their objects are in storage rooms. As collections grow, financial resources continue to dwindle, leaving museums struggling to ensure that their treasures in storage are adequately looked after and accessible

In 2017, a pilot survey of contemporary art collections in Argentinian museums was carried out by ICCROM, in collaboration with the Argentinian Ministry of Culture (Dirección Nacional de Bienes y Sitios Culturales – DNBSC). This survey forms the basis of ICCROM's 2020/2021 agenda to assess needs and improve the conservation and management of contemporary art collections at the regional level in Latin America and the Caribbean.