'Science in safe hands', Science and Engineering for Cultural Heritage Meeting

Panel discussion during SERCH conference 2025. Experts debate the balance between innovation and craft.

Fostering collaboration between scientists, engineers, conservators and curators to develop techniques that help take care of cultural heritage.

The Science and Engineering Research for Cultural Heritage (SERCH) conference took place on the 12th February at Imperial College London bringing together over 80 people. Cultural heritage specialists and Imperial scientists shared their latest results and discussed the future of innovation and craft in the age of AI. 

Engineers from Imperial working on cultural heritage? 

The SERCH network was created to foster collaboration between Imperial scientists and heritage professionals (such as conservators and curators) to find solutions to cultural heritage challenges. Ambrose Taylor, SERCH’s academic lead, explained how a few years ago, he was working on cultural heritage questions and knew some of his colleagues were too, but everyone thought they were the only ones doing so. The SERCH network now connects 30 Imperial scientists with cultural heritage specialists, and among themselves, supporting funding applications and training the next generation of interdisciplinary cultural heritage scientists. 

'Science in Safe Hands'

This year’s conference theme, ‘Science in Safe Hands’ was chosen to highlight the role of practical skills in the field of cultural heritage. Throughout the day, there were talks focused on science and engineering, conservation, and arts and heritage. These included presentations on the value of crafts from Kate Jennings, subject leader in metals at West Dean College, and from Liva Donina (Chemical Engineering) and Elena Dieckmann (Design Engineering) who explained the potential of paper marbling for security marking of objects. 

Since practical skills require tools, attendees also had the opportunity to hear from Alex Marsch who runs an open-access workshop in Park Royal providing affordable access to equipment, and from Simon Turner, senior technician at Imperial, who designs and makes specialist tools for scientists.  

Katerina Laina, from the Parliamentary Archives, presented a video showcasing the entire process of restoring tracing paper plans from the British industrial revolution. 

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Why is it important that scientists, conservators and curators work together?  

We provide information to the conservator who can then reveal the original object using the right materials. Lucia Burgio Heritage scientist at the V&A

The information provided by scientists influences the work of conservators and artists. Lucia Burgio, from the V&A explained the magic triangle of scientists, conservators and curators. ‘By being embedded in the collections, the scientists provide information about the materials to the conservators, who can then decide what is the best treatment. The curators also have questions, and new objects arriving at museums need to be characterised by scientists before being exhibited’. Marc Vermeulen, from The National Archives, also emphasized how research into scientific aspects is needed to understand materials and their degradation and to design strategies to recover fragile artefacts.

This collaboration between scientists and cultural heritage specialists goes beyond conservation. In the last talk of the day, Alex Christopherson, a former Mechanical Engineering student, and David Samuel, an artist based at Park Royal, shared with the audience how they worked together to create a new piece of art, part sculpture, part microscope. To learn more about their collaboration, read our blog and listen to our podcast. 

Panel discussion on balancing innovation in AI and practical skills 

I asked chatGPT how to clean a fossil and the answer was: ‘wash it under the tap, use a toothbrush’. Because I know how to clean fossils that made me nervous, if you don’t have the expertise and understanding you then don’t have the judgement about how much you can trust the data. You need to make sure to have an understanding of the subject to know if the advice is good or bad Lorraine Cornish Head of Conservation at the Natural History Museum

An expert panel, including Imperial academics Ambrose Taylor and Pier Luigi Dragotti, cultural heritage specialist Lorraine Cornish, and chemistry technician Kat Harris, discussed the balance between adoption of AI technologies and safeguarding practical skills. While AI could be used to predict degradation and model environments, remedial works to artefacts will always have to be done by hand. The potential of AI to make us more productive was highlighted, as well as the limitations and risks associated with a reduction in the expertise gained by experience. 

To hear the full discussion, listen to our podcast episode no. 32. 

You can also heard interviews with some of the speakers and attendees in our podcast episode no. 33.

New collaborations and looking into the future

The conference ended with a drinks reception where attendees engaged in conversations around posters and exchanged their contacts to continue and/or start collaborating in the future. 

If you would like to find out more about the SERCH network, sign-up to our newsletter. 

You can watch all the talks at the conference following this link.