Condition report
A dated record of an artwork's physical state (materials, damage, wear, past repairs) used as the baseline for maintenance and conservation decisions.
The discipline is simple: photograph everything, date everything, and repeat on a schedule. For outdoor works an annual walk-through is the workable minimum. It catches the small, cheap problems (a failed coating, a loose anchor, water pooling where it shouldn't) before they become the large, expensive ones. A condition report from installation day is the single most useful document a collection can hold, because every later assessment is measured against it. The reports work hardest when they live with each work's record in a collections management system, so every assessment joins a timeline instead of a filing cabinet.