Condition report form

A condition report is a dated snapshot of one artwork's physical state. It is not a maintenance plan and it is not a conservation treatment proposal. Its whole job is to describe what is true today clearly enough that someone reading it in three years can tell what has changed.

That comparison is the point, and it is what most condition reporting gets wrong. A beautifully written report that uses different words and different camera angles from the last one tells you very little. A plain report that uses the same categories, the same rating scale, and the same three photographic angles every time will show you a collection aging in slow motion.

Use this as a form to copy. Write it for the person who inherits your job.

Before you look

Fill in the header before you leave the office, not in the field. It takes five minutes at a desk and twenty in the wind.

• Accession number. The stable ID from your inventory, assigned at accession. Everything else is a label; this is the key the report files under.
• Title, artist, and year. Copied from the record rather than recalled. If the record disagrees with the plaque, note both and flag it. That discrepancy is worth more than a tidy form.
• Location. Address plus the site description, so the next assessor finds the same face of the same work.
• Assessor and date. Your name, because a rating is a judgment and a reader deserves to know whose.
• Previous report date and rating. Carry them forward onto the form. You are not assessing in a vacuum; you are looking for change.

Examination conditions

Two assessors can rate the same sculpture differently because one saw it in flat morning light and the other in hard afternoon sun. Record the circumstances so a later reader can discount them.

• Weather and light. Dry or wet, overcast or direct sun. Wet stone reads darker and hides staining; low sun exaggerates every surface irregularity.
• Access. What you could actually reach and see. A twelve-foot bronze inspected from the ground has an unexamined top half, and the report should say so rather than implying a full survey.
• Equipment used. Ladder, lift, binoculars, flashlight, moisture meter, or nothing but your eyes.
• What you could not assess. The most valuable line on the form. Interior structure, footings below grade, the reverse of a wall-mounted work, anything behind vegetation.

The condition rating

Use one four-step scale for the whole collection and define it once so it means the same thing to everyone. These definitions are a reasonable starting point; adjust the wording to your program and then leave it alone, because a scale that shifts is a scale you cannot trend.

• Excellent. As intended. No deterioration beyond normal aging of the material.
• Good. Minor issues that are cosmetic and stable. Routine maintenance addresses them.
• Fair. Active deterioration, or damage that will worsen without intervention. Schedule work this cycle.
• Poor. Structural concern, safety concern, or loss of significant material. Escalate now.

Record the rating with the date beside it, always. An undated rating is trivia within a year.

Observations

Walk the same categories every time, in the same order. Note "no change" as readily as you note damage, because an unremarked category is ambiguous: a later reader cannot tell whether you looked and saw nothing or simply did not look.

Structure and mounting

Cracks, deformation, movement at joints, loose or missing fixings, corrosion at bolts and base plates, settlement or tilt of the plinth. Anything that bears on whether the work is safely attached to the ground belongs here and outranks everything below it.

Surface and finish

Coating loss, fading, chalking, flaking paint, rust bloom, patina change, staining, mineral deposits, abrasion. For a mural, record areas of paint loss as an approximate percentage of the wall and note whether loss follows the substrate (a failing wall) or the paint film (a failing coating). The distinction determines who you call.

Biological growth and site conditions

Moss, lichen, algae, bird fouling, vegetation in contact with the work, pooling water, blocked drainage, sprinklers striking the surface. Most outdoor deterioration is a water management problem wearing a costume, so record where water goes.

Vandalism and wear

Graffiti, scratched or carved marks, stickers, missing elements, damage from adjacent use. Note whether an anti-graffiti coating is present and whether it is still working, since a failed sacrificial coating is itself a maintenance item.

Interpretation and context

Plaque present, legible, and accurate. Lighting functioning. Sightlines clear. These are not conservation issues, but they are the ones the public experiences most, and nobody else on your team is standing there to notice.

Photography

Photographs are the part of the report that will still be useful when the prose has dated. Shoot for comparison rather than for beauty.

• Three overall views from fixed positions, recorded so they can be repeated. Note the approximate compass direction and distance, or mark the spots.
• Detail shots of every issue you describe, each with a scale in frame. A coin or a ruler is enough. Without a scale, a photograph of a crack is not evidence.
• Repeat the previous report's angles before you take anything new. Two images of the same view a year apart do more work than twenty new ones.
• File names carry the accession number and the date. The photograph is only as useful as your ability to find it.

Recommendation

Close with what should happen and how soon. Keep the options short and consistent, because these roll up into a program's maintenance budget and a free-text recommendation cannot be counted.

• No action. Reassess on the normal cycle.
• Monitor. Something is changing but does not warrant work yet. Name what you are watching and set the next look sooner than the standard cycle.
• Schedule maintenance. Routine work, within the current cycle. Say what.
• Specialist referral. Beyond in-house capability. Note this plainly rather than guessing at a treatment.
• Urgent. Safety or imminent loss. Escalate the same day.

One discipline matters more than the rest here: describe, do not diagnose past your competence. "Rust staining along the lower seam, approximately 30 cm" is a report. "The armature is failing" is a conclusion a conservator should reach. Reports that overreach get quietly discounted by the people who most need to trust them.

Making the reports comparable

Three habits turn a pile of reports into a record. Use one controlled vocabulary for ratings and categories and never free-type a value a list should own. Date every assertion, including the ones that report no change. And keep the reports attached to the artwork record rather than in a folder of their own, so the history travels with the work through relocation, and stays intact even after deaccession.

Do not wait for a complete survey to start. A dated, honest report on twenty works you can reach beats a perfect methodology applied to nothing. Assess what you can get to this season, use the same form next season, and the comparison you actually need will begin to exist.

If you want these reports living beside the artwork records rather than in a shared drive, that is what collections management is for. Book a demo and we will look at your collection together.