Students in my Disaster Planning and Response class paid a visit to the Flower Hill Center this semester to conduct a risk assessment. Tucked away on wooded grounds on W 6th St., Flower Hill is the longtime home of the Smoot family in Austin, TX. The home was built in the 1870s, and family lived there through 2013. Today, Flower Hill is a museum and historical center hidden in plain sight in central Austin!
The Flower Hill Center
My students focused their work on the home’s library, home of the fore-runner institution to the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. A risk assessment is a preservation report that identifies and prioritizes threats to the longevity of a collection or site, and then recommends preventive actions to manage those threats. A variety of risk assessment models are used in the field; our class focuses on the ABC Method published by the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM).
Michele Stewart and Natalie George give students a tour inside the Flower Hill Center.
Working in groups, students identified and proposed action for risks in temperature, relative humidity, water incursion, and dissociation. Through this exercise, they learned about preservation challenges for books, photographs, ceramics, wooden objects, and metals. Big thanks to Michele Stewart and Natalie George for hosting our students to work onsite at Flower Hill and to gain hands-on experience!