ABSTRACT
The collections of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation play a vital role in serving its educational mission. In addition to being displayed in regularly changing exhibitions in one of three dedicated textile galleries in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum and the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, the collection of historic garments and textiles is routinely examined by Foundation staff. Curators, historic tradespeople and the team that creates wardrobes for costumed interpreters all use the collection to inform their work. The collection is also available to and regularly accessed by visiting scholars and students. This frequent access to the collection for rigorous scholarship shapes all preservation decisions, from methods of storage to treatment intervention. Textile conservation staff regularly confer with these groups of dedicated stakeholders to devise conservation treatments that serve the long-term preservation goals of collection’s care while providing the visual access required for the study and deeper understanding of the collection. This has resulted in a range of storage methods, display mounts and a body of priorities and considerations that guide treatment of the collection.
