Conservation
Our team preserves and protects the material legacy of 9/11 through preventative care, interventive treatment, and meticulous documentation of the 82,000+ physical and digital artifacts in the collection. Learn more about how collection's stewardship preserves the story of 9/11 and how you can support this important work.
Preserving the History of 9/11: How We Got Here
In 2002, during the post-9/11 recovery efforts, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) contracted outside cultural heritage conservators to help document and preserve materials collected from Ground Zero. Working with PANYNJ engineers and staff, conservators helped safeguard and stabilize recovered artifacts at Hangar 17 at JFK International Airport. In the wake of the 2001 attacks, this unlikely space had been retrofitted into a temporary storage facility for salvaged artifacts from the World Trade Center.
These objects became the cornerstone of the future Museum’s permanent collection. Their preservation was prioritized in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum’s foundational collections management policy, and the practices related to their conservation have been integral to the collection ever since.
Today & Into the Future
Since 2006, preservation has been the continual concern of the Museum’s collection curators, managers and caretakers. With specialized training in chemistry, material science, and the cultural heritage preservation, our conservation team are responsible for studying, analyzing, and stabilizing the physical materials and belongings entrusted to the Museum for posterity and remembrance. These conservators collaborate with other departments to provide advice on environmental controls, exhibition and installation requirements, storage strategies and conditions, and the feasibility of outgoing loans to other museums and entities. Specialized archivists also work to preserve the Museum’s digital collections, which include audio, visual, moving image, and text-based materials. In 2021, these combined practices helped to secure the Museum’s national accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums.
Conservation practices are key to safeguarding the stories of 9/11 embodied in our diverse collection for visitors, friends and family members today, as well as for future researchers, educators and interested members of the public. Because increasing numbers of our audience have no living memory of 9/11, preserving the evidence of the attacks, victims and survivors, recovery and rebuilding efforts, and continuing impacts becomes ever more crucial to understanding the scale of this transformative event.
Documentation as Preservation
Recording the current state of artifacts held by the Museum facilitates the efforts of conservators to stabilize and monitor them for changes while aiding accessibility to the collection overall. At the 9/11 Museum this documentation effort involves research, photography, scientific analysis, and written reports on materials and the observed condition of artifacts and ephemera held in the collection.
Our Conservation Approach
Often, conservation work involves the removal or stabilization of damage that has occurred to art and physical cultural heritage. At the 9/11 Museum, damage can be integral to the authentic history that we chronicle. Therefore, our conservators bring careful thought to the ethics of any intervention proposed for objects in the collection, to ensure that we are not altering any evidence intrinsic to the object’s significance and emotional impact. On the rare occasions when object treatments are considered necessary, we focus on finding solutions that will minimize material and aesthetic changes over time.
Preventive Conservation
Maintaining the received condition and appearance of artifacts at the time of their collection or encounter with 9/11’s trauma is vital to the Museum’s preservation approach. Instead of taking direct actions and interventions affecting individual objects, preventive conservation operates on a collection-wide level by identifying and mitigating risks and by improving the variables of exhibition, storage and housing environments that affect the collection. This involves monitoring light levels, temperature, and relative humidity, research and analysis of materials used for display and storage, and collaborating with colleagues with specialized expertise assigned to other departments across the institution.
Digital Preservation
Digital objects, including born-digital and digitized, represent an important and growing category of the Museum’s collection. The Museum is committed to preserving and ensuring access to these born-digital or made-digital objects, which include photographs, moving images, audio, textual materials, artworks, and more. Digital preservation is carried out as a collaboration between the Collections team and the IT department. The Museum strives to comply with the latest digital preservation standards set forth by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. We continually review and update our digital preservation practices to align with the evolving needs of the collection as well as its community of users, and to stay in pace with “best practices” focused on technology’s inevitable changes.
Education & Outreach
The conservation team regularly publishes and lectures on the challenges and unique circumstances involved in safeguarding our multi-format collections, such as caring for trauma-impacted objects and distinguishing between contextual condition issues and unrelated material degradation. The intensely personal and human-centered associations and emotions attached to specific artifacts often require innovative solutions that challenge or fall outside traditional models of preservation.
Conservation accepts applications for undergraduate and graduate interns. Please contact conservation@911memorial.org.
The Highest Standards of Care
All conservation work at the 9/11 Museum is done in accordance with ethical standards and guidelines set by the American Institution of Conservation.
Support Our Work
Did you know that the work of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is largely made possible by the generous donations of our community? To continue the legacy and honor the lives lost on 9/11, please consider donating.
More About Our Conservation Efforts
Mission to Remember: Conserving Objects
Conservators at the 9/11 Memorial Museum have a unique responsibility to preserve objects that have been significantly damaged and whose meaning is often found in the damage itself. Learn more as a conservator discusses the special challenge of working with diverse materials—fine art, textiles, handwritten notes, monumental emergency vehicles, World Trade Center steel—that together tell the story of 9/11.
Video: Mission to Remember Series: Conserving Objects
Explore the Collection
The 9/11 Memorial Museum’s permanent collection is an unparalleled repository consisting of material evidence, first-person testimony, and historical records of response to February 26, 1993, and September 11, 2001, and the ongoing repercussions of these terrorist events.
