Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2018 - 25

Profile
Member Profile - Lisa Elkin
by Ann Pinzl

Our members play
many different roles,
from collection management and conservation, to databasing
and informatics, to
research and education. Many of our
members come from
a traditional research
background while
many of our new
members are coming
into the field from
the museum studies field. Our hope
is to introduce our
membership to a variety of individuals who are playing very
dynamic roles in their museum's activities. We are casting
our net broadly and selecting individuals from institutions of
all sizes and backgrounds.

Snapshot
What is your name?
Lisa Elkin
What is your position?
Chief Registrar and Director of Conservation
Where do you work? How many years have you
been working in this capacity?
I work at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City and have been there since 1993-it's the only place
I've worked since my graduate school training in conservation. Fresh out of the Buffalo State Collection Master's
program in Art Conservation in 1993, I was hired as a conservator in the AMNH Anthropology Conservation lab where
I worked for nearly 10 years treating archaeological and
ethnographic collections in preparation not only for display
but also focusing on elements of preventive care for the
collections. In 2001, as a response to our institution's needs
to focus more resources on the care and conservation of the
natural science collections, the museum developed a new position: Conservator of Natural Science collections and I was
hired to start up that new program. I've been working in that
capacity ever since, while also taking on a newer challenge in
managing the Office of the Registrar since 2011.

When did you join SPNHC?
I joined SPNHC sometime in the late 90s. My first meeting was in Washington, DC, in 1999, followed by Halifax
in 2000-those meetings were eye-opening and inspiring
and I developed friendships that have remained close since.
It was around that time that I began thinking about how to
pursue natural science conservation and incorporate that into
my job at AMNH. I got involved, first volunteering with the
conservation committee, then as a committee member on
the host committee for SPNHC 2004 at AMNH, and finally
as a member-at-large around 2006. As a member-at-large, I
chaired a publicity and outreach subcommittee that, among
other things worked to update the Society's website and
develop its logo. Currently, I'm co-editing a new volume for
which SPNHC is one of the partnering publishers, Preventive Conservation: Collection Care (expected release Spring
2018... fingers crossed!).

In-depth
What drew you to the natural history field?
My initial interest when pursuing conservation was in the
field of Anthropology, specifically working with archaeological and ethnographic material. There was no natural science
conservation lab in the museum in those early days (the 90s)
so if staff from the natural science collections had questions
about preserving or conserving their collections, they would
come to our team in Anthropology. I loved helping them
resolve some of these challenges and saw how naturally my
training in Anthro conservation could be transferred to these
collections. There was a great need for more natural science
conservators at the time-there still is. Folks like Chris Norris (then the AMNH Mammalogy collection manager, now at
Yale Peabody Museum), Linda Ford (then the AMNH Herpetology collection manager, now at Harvard), and Barbara
Brown (then the AMNH Ichthyology collection manager,
still here at AMNH, like me!) comprised a force of collection
managers to be reckoned with! They were highly professional
and skilled and quick to share their knowledge; I learned so
much from all of them. I also met and started working with
AMNH fossil preparators like Amy Davidson, who were
doing unbelievably skilled work that was so closely aligned
with conservation treatments. The collaborations that followed were exciting and I saw how much positive impact
conservation could have on the long-term preservation of
natural science collections.

March 2018 * 25

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections March 2018