IMC — Institute of Museums and Conservation

The Institute of Museums and Conservation, I. P. (IMC) was a Portuguese public institute that, between 2007 and 2012, concentrated oversight of the principal national museums and responsibility for the conservation and restoration of movable cultural heritage. It operated under the Ministry of Culture, with its seat in Lisbon, and was one of the central bodies of heritage administration in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Creation and responsibilities

The IMC was established within the Programme for the Restructuring of the Central State Administration (PRACE) and regulated by Decree-Law no. 97/2007 of 29 March. It resulted from the merger of three earlier entities: the Portuguese Institute of Museums, created in 1991 and responsible for the network of state-dependent museums; the Portuguese Institute of Conservation and Restoration, heir to the Instituto José de Figueiredo and dedicated to the conservation of movable heritage; and the mission structure Portuguese Museum Network, which coordinated the articulation between museums under different oversight.

With this concentration of competences, the IMC came to supervise a vast set of institutions — museums of art, of archaeology and of ethnology and several national palaces — spread across practically every region of the country. It was also responsible for managing the Portuguese Museum Network, an instrument for the qualification and accreditation of museum units, and for defining policies for the inventory, safeguarding and study of public collections. The institute thus combined, within a single body, the museological functions and the technical conservation functions that had previously been separated.

Conservation, museums and the institutional framework

The novelty of the IMC’s model lay in the explicit link between museum management and conservation and restoration. By integrating specialised laboratories and technical teams, the institute sought to bring the material research of artworks closer to the exhibition and storage requirements of museums. This orientation formed part of the long history of heritage institutions in Portugal, marked by the successive creation, merger and abolition of bodies with competences over movable and built heritage.

In the same period the IGESPAR coexisted, responsible for architectural and archaeological heritage, so that oversight of heritage was divided between two large institutes: one for museums and movable heritage, another for monuments and sites. This division between the “movable” and the “immovable” would prove transitory.

Abolition and integration into the DGPC

The IMC’s existence was relatively short. Within the framework of a new reorganisation of the central administration, decided in 2011 and carried out in 2012, the institute was abolished and merged with the IGESPAR. From that process emerged the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage, created by Decree-Law no. 115/2012 of 25 May, which came to bring together in a single structure the oversight of museums, palaces, monuments and archaeology.

With its abolition, the administrative and technical archives of the IMC were transferred to the DGPC, where they continue to be consulted as a source for the history of museological and conservation policies in Portugal. Though brief, the IMC’s experience represented a significant attempt to articulate, under a single directorate, the management of the national museums and the conservation of movable cultural heritage.