Conservation is a new academic discipline. Its basic purpose is to protect and preserve our cultural heritage. From the point of view of preserving cultural heritage, it is close to heritology and museology, especially in the areas of museography and documentation. In Finland, conservation is not yet an academic discipline. This is the first PhD work related to conservation processes and conservation management in Finland. The main research problems are to study the process of conservation and the substances that are needed for conservation management. The research gives basic principles and tools for creating conservation strategies. Defining conservation and major terminology in the Finnish language is necessary. One important issue is the development of Finnish conservation education at the university level according to the Bologna agreement. This PhD thesis is limited to the conservation management of immovable cultural heritage related to paper conservation. The conservation proc
ess is seen as an important part of active and dynamic preservation of our cultural heritage. Traditionally the term conservation has been divided to mean technical conservation, treatments, and preventive conservation, storage, but this division is too limited and narrow. Conservation should be understood as the broad management of collection preservation. Different heritage organisations preserving our cultural heritage have their own policies in preservation and use of collections. That which is collected and stored is defined in legislation and collection policy. The collection policy of many art museums in Finland is public and can be found on the internet. The conservator, as a highly trained specialist, together with other personnel in heritage organisations, is responsible for the decision-making of, for example, the care, storage, use, microfilming and digitizing, in addition to the safety of collections. The conservator should have a broad basic knowledge of the production of different objects, about their material composition and deterioration mechanisms, as well as their cultural and art historic context. The process of conservation together with collection management policies lead to the development of conservation strategies. Ready strategies are not presented, but tools for creating them are. The level of disaster preparedness in Finland is unfortunately low, as several cases of fire and water damage have shown. A future research subject detailing a national preparedness plan against fire and water damage is presented in this dissertation. Other future research plans mentioned include a study of the new condition survey methodology to be used in the wide survey at the National Archives of Finland in 2008-2009.
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