Daly Conservation

One of my favorite initiatives is Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS!)
I like the initiative for many reasons:
1. I love outdoor sculpture and monuments and I could look at them or talk about them for days.
2. It is a collaborative project, anyone in the USA can contribute, from girl scouts (there is a merit badge) to conservation professionals, to interested community members.
3. It shows how important documentation is to conservation. Treatments are exciting, but good, thorough documentation and knowing what to look for is what will inform treatments. You can’t make recommendations for treatments until you have comprehensively documented a work.

There are currently around 40,000 sculptures in the database. Nancy Proctor the Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum spoke about SOS in an interview with Sumaya Kazi the Senior Social Manager of Sun Microsystems on her blog talk radio show socially speaking. The interview included discussions about how the Smithsonian is using social media to make their collections more available. Nancy spoke about how the SOS! project can continue to create Wikipedia pages for each sculpture that could be linked to Flickr photos, allowing the public full access to the information. This would preserve the sculptures and educate the public about them. The interview has a great review by Molly Holtman on her blog.

Dale Chihuly Sculpture, Missouri Botanical Gardens
Source: creative commons on flickr.com

Another Smithsonian outreach project is Artful Abe which takes the visitor to statues of Abraham Lincoln from around the country and then relates them to pieces in the collection at the American Art Museum. A scavenger hunt using google maps and the American Art database. It is a great way to make the collection accessible to everyone with online access.

I am hoping to add reports to the SOS! database, writing reports is a skill I would like to improve. I have scanned a SOS form and I hope I can find some sculptures in Vermont to document and add to the database.