New Report: Prioritization in Museum Collections – A Part of War and Disaster Preparedness

Due to the changed security situation following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Swedish museums have had to focus on preparedness issues more than in a long while.Since last year, a report from the Swedish National Heritage Board (Carlsten 2023) provides support for value assessments and prioritizing what objects to evacuate in the event of war or disaster.Because how do you select a few objects out of thousands in a collection?The report aims to highlight literature, research and experiences that can support museums in prioritizing.It includes a literature review, suggestions for valuation methods and descriptions of hands-on experiences from three museums that manage varied collections; culturalhistorical and archaeological objects as well as art and archives.Collections priority lists can be used for preventive and emergency evacuation as well as salvaging.War and disaster are wide terms and include many types of risks and scenarios, from flooding and fire to vandalism (Ashley-Smith 1999;McWilliams 2024).The report assumes that values are neither static nor inherent, that they change over time and depend on who is doing the valuation (Gnetay & Lindberg 2014).The process of prioritizing is usually divided into three steps.The first step is to identify the different values of objects, and then their significance (to put it simply: the sum of all values).Prioritization normally follows these two steps of evaluation and often considers more than values, such as risk and material conditions.Some methods use risk and the material conditions of the