This study investigated the socio-economic and environmental impacts of preservation and conservation practices in selected academic libraries in Kwara State, Nigeria. The study adopts cross-sectional research design. The social impacts of preservation and conservation practices include the enhancement of societal progress and understanding, enhanced learning by providing diverse perspectives in relation to communal issues, improved cultural heritage awareness, and the preservation of rare artefacts. The economic impacts of these practices include reducing financial burdens, reducing the need for frequent replacements of library materials, and optimising budget allocation by extending material lifespan. The environmental impacts include the support for waste minimisation and the reduction in the environmental impacts of library operations. The study showed that the challenges associated with the adoption of eco-friendly conservation practices include a poor maintenance culture and the absence of preservation policies. The article recommends that academic libraries in Nigeria should invest in modern energy-efficient equipment for long time preservation of their assets.

The preservation of human anatomical remains in teaching collections can, under very specific circumstances, play a role in education and research, allowing an in-depth and respectful study of the human body and its complexities. However, their preservation—including documentation, communication, management and ethics—permeates disciplinary issues that directly link to discussions around decolonisation and interdisciplinarity. The objective of this study is to develop a theoretical account of the preservation for legacy human-remains collections that is grounded in consent, proportionality, dignity and epistemic justice, one that orients (but does not predetermine) their future musealisation. The approach adopted and reported here is based on a literature review and practical experience preserving human remains at the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo (FMUSP) Pathology Collection.

In 1982, an Ichthyosaur fossil was found in Caldecotte Lake in Milton Keynes in England. It was planned to be displayed in the Milton Keynes Museum but pending a suitable gallery being available it was kept at the Milton Keynes main library. In 2024 the Ichthyosaur became the centrepiece of the Jurassic section for the museum’s newly opened Ancient Gallery. The move from the library involved conservation, restoration and a complete re-display of the fossil. The goal of the re-display work was to create a reversible supporting insert for the Ichthyosaur which allowed for its fragments to be easily examined and accessed, without being fixed in the case. A thermoplastic, Worbla's TranspArt, was used to achieve this re-display. In this article we document the process involved including the removal of the fossil from the wall in the library, transporting it to the museum, its reassembly and its final placement in a custom-built case in the new gallery.

This article explores the relationship between care, digital preservation and technology using a variety of storytelling methods. It moves between personal narratives, case studies, theoretical frameworks and technical explanations, to demonstrate that care is a continuous and attentive practice in digital preservation. By blending technical details with sensory experiences, it highlights the active relationship between technology and care. This unconventional approach challenges the traditional divide between humans and technology in preservation, suggesting that technology can also be a form of care. As such, the structure of the text reflects its main argument: digital preservation is not a static task but a collective, sustained and socio-technical practice involving both human and non-human actors in a dynamic network of care.

This article explores preventive conservation as more than a technical discipline. We approach this inquiry through a lens of reflexivity (sensu Bourdieu), informed by our professional experiences across diverse institutional and cultural contexts in Latin America, Southeast Europe and Norway. From this standpoint, we revisit core disciplinary concepts such as risk management, standardisation and museum storage, exploring how notions of care and ethics of care might reframe them. Through case-based reflections, we illustrate how prevailing practices and standards can reinforce inequalities, limit accessibility, and potentially challenge relationships between people and heritage. We also bring to light dimensions of preventive conservation work that often remain invisible or tacit, and are backgrounded as secondary to technical expertise, yet are essential for care-centred approaches to both people and objects. As a result, we call for a broader understanding of ‘environment’ in preventive conservation, one that moves beyond metrics to include institutional contexts, social relations, and power dynamics. This shift invites a move from control to collaboration, where care becomes a conceptual and operational principle embedded in institutional frameworks.

Framing conservation as a care practice, albeit a privileged one, has proved productive in articulating connections between conservation and wider social and political concerns. The discourse on care situates conservation within the broader effort to ‘maintain, continue, and repair our world’. This framework highlights the embodied and affective practice of conservation as something with material consequences that ‘we do and feel’. In embracing conservators as subject to affective responses, ethical dilemmas, psychological stressors and competing demands, this paper asks how the affective turn might change the way we think about managing conservation. Building on scholarship from adjacent fields, acknowledging how our understanding of this work is revealed through the tensions that emerge through our practices as set within the specifics of time and place, key elements from an ethics of care and their intersection with the management of conservation are explored.

As conservators increasingly acknowledge the relational nature of collections care and the impact of our professional work on people, the value of an object increasingly rests on the significance that people attribute to it. Conservators are providing transitive care for people through the act of caring for objects valued by the community, and efforts are strengthened by including community members in the care process. This approach foregrounds building trusting relationships in sometimes fraught circumstances through collaborative partnerships and long-term commitment. Our case studies illustrate diverse applications of an inclusive caregiving conservation approach. They include an archaeological textile conservation project, pre-disaster Alliance for Response initiatives, and Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative heritage community support efforts in disaster contexts. Cultural recovery is an act of caring for people by caring for objects; including people who are not conservation specialists in this process exemplifies the relational nature of providing care.

This article proposes attunement as an embodied methodology for conservation practices, grounded in relationality, intra-dependence and affective responsiveness. Borrowing from agential realism and posthumanist, queer, feminist, Indigenous, Black and anti-colonial scholarship, it critiques dominant conservation frameworks rooted in settler colonial and capitalist logics that prioritise extraction, certainty and control. In contrast, it explores how caring for artworks-as-cultural-heritage—and as emergent, indeterminate parts of the world—requires attentiveness and responsiveness to the ethical, political and affective dimensions of artworks and their extended material-discursive ecologies. Attunement is positioned as a practice of listening-with and allowing oneself to be stilled, reconfigured and mobilised toward more reciprocal and coalitional ways of knowing and doing. Recognising that the knowledge we produce is not neutral but intra-actively constituted through our methods, this article foregrounds attunement as a methodological counter to the epistemic violence enacted by extractivist, habituated and universalising conservation practices. It invites conservators to reckon with the inheritances and violences of colonialism and capitalism in their work—including around how knowledge is generated and recorded—and to imagine conservation as part of a broader practice of solidarity work, relational care and world-making.

This article proposes pluriversal care as an infrastructural framework for reconfiguring museum practices beyond accumulation. It traces the polycrisis facing museums (and the planet) back to operational models inherited from Enlightenment ideals and maps a conceptual shift in museum theory: from a universal, object-centred approach to an understanding of museums as pluriversal compositions. In turn, museums connect and respond to multiple ways of being in the world. Using infrastructural inversion, the article analyses how routine but contested practices of accumulation, driven by infrastructural neglect, have become normalised, undermining museums’ capacity to properly care for both collections and communities. This analysis applies broadly to collecting institutions, particularly those with taxpayer participation in funding. Here, the term collection spans physical, conceptual, digital and immaterial forms; and accumulation is a systemic issue concerning collections across the spectrum. Starting from a historical perspective, the article draws from contemporary theory and practice in order to propose a speculative post-accumulation museology framework in which museums undergo a transformation. Overall, this study invites institutions to develop this thinking further, not only to retain their relevance but also, more importantly, to contribute to planetary well-being.