Exhibition Design Editing and Proofreading Services

A loan agreement for a fragile textile states that the object requires "appropriate environmental controls" during display. The exhibition designer, working from that single phrase, places it in a case with the same lighting and humidity range used for the rest of the gallery, because nothing told them this particular object's tolerance was meaningfully lower than everything else in the room. Three months into the run, the lending institution's conservator visits, measures fade on the textile that would not have occurred at the object's actual required light level, and the loan is recalled early, over a phrase that both sides believed they had already addressed.

We edit what exhibition designers and museums produce to specify how sensitive objects are actually displayed — object environmental and handling requirement disclosures, case and mount specification documents, light level and exposure duration schedules, and the correspondence between an exhibition designer and a lending institution's conservator about a specific object's display conditions. Our editors work on the gap between "appropriate environmental controls" and the specific numbers a display case actually has to hold.

The specific, numeric environmental requirement is what an object handling disclosure actually needs to state, and its failure is a general phrase that sounds like a specification without functioning as one. Appropriate environmental controls could mean the standard gallery range or a far more restrictive one, and a designer working from the phrase alone has no way to tell which, because the sentence was never actually built to convey a number. We work through these so light level and cumulative exposure are stated as actual figures — maximum lux, maximum annual light exposure in lux-hours — rather than a general instruction to protect light-sensitive material, since a designer setting case lighting needs a number to design against, not a category; so humidity and temperature tolerance are stated as a specific range with the acceptable rate of change, given that an object's risk often comes from fluctuation rather than the absolute level, and "controlled environment" says nothing about how much drift is actually tolerable; so mount and handling requirements are stated specifically for the object's actual construction and condition, because a generic mount appropriate for a stable object can itself cause damage to a fragile one; so exposure duration is disclosed where relevant, given that some objects are limited by cumulative display time rather than display conditions alone, and a designer needs to know if the object has to be rotated out partway through a run; and so a designer's specific question about a specific object's requirements receives a specific answer from someone with authority over that object's condition, not a repetition of the loan agreement's general language. Disclosures written this way mean a case is actually built to the number the object needs, not to a phrase that sounded like it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including object condition data, loan terms and conservator correspondence. We are editors rather than conservators, exhibition designers or collections specialists, and we offer no view on environmental requirements, object condition or display safety. What we can do is make sure the requirement is stated as a number a case can actually be built to.