Visiting Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond at the Louisiana State Museum in March 2012.

This month I begin a new venture: developing a preservation and emergency consulting practice. You can visit my new website at www.rebeccafifieldpreservation.com. I’ve largely been an institutional creature up to this point in my career. I crave process and figuring out systems that bring colleagues together. I’ve decided to take that enthusiasm to help a variety of organizations with their preservation and emergency planning challenges. I’ll be offering collections management and emergency preparedness services as well as historical research and interpretation services. Some of my favorite past experiences included my work with local history collections and historical sites. Staff and volunteers at these sites often provide much of the elbow grease and demonstrate real buy-in. These are organizations that can really benefit from a systematic approach to preservation that uses their limited resources wisely. Successful preservation programs are dependent not only on conservation science, but on creative management, benchmarking, and staff coaching. Preservation must be a joint effort in which all inputs are valued – this fosters cross-organization collaboration.