BECKY FIFIELD
Preservation is us.
We keep things that are meaningful to us. As a culture, we seek to sustain tangible items of meaning to center us. That requires preservation. We preserve these things personally, as institutions, as communities.
I've been working in cultural heritage since 1988, and with collections since 1991. I am interested in the big picture. The why of preservation. The relationships we foster to make preservation happen. How we support each other when things get tough. How we get to the goal.
Me in the York Sunday News on August 13, 1995 talking about caring for collections at the Carroll County Farm Museum, Westminster, Maryland. I started working in museums in 1988.
Rebecca Fifield is Associate Director, Collection Management for the Research Libraries of The New York Public Library, establishing that program in the Preservation and Collections Processing Division in 2016. Ms. Fifield has over 30 years experience working with art and history collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She holds an M.A. in Museum Studies from The George Washington University, where she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Collection Care Administrator Training Program Fellow. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Conservation, former Chair of AIC’s Collection Care Network, and served as Chair of Alliance for Response, NYC during hurricanes Irene and Sandy. Currently, she serves on the Technical Committee of the National Fire Protection Association’s Code 909, Code for the Protection of Cultural Resource Properties - Museums, Libraries, and Places of Worship. She has written and presented on emergency preparedness, collection stewardship, and outreach for the American Institute for Conservation, the American Alliance of Museums, the Association of Registrars and Collection Specialists, the Association for Preservation Technologies International, the Alberta Museum Association, the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections, and the NYC Office of Emergency Management. She is the author of “Emergency Management” in Preventive Conservation: Collection Storage and “Recovery” in Help! An Emergency Preparedness Manual for Museums, 2nd Edition.