Condition Assessment of Historic House Collections: Testing Different Statistical Methods at the Château de Versailles

ABSTRACT

One of the aims of the European Protocol in Preventive Conservation (EPICO) research programme was to implement a simple and flexible assessment method applicable to the majority of historic houses. We present results to verify statistical methods for the application in the assessment of heterogeneous in collections historic houses. For a collection with less than five hundred objects, a complete inventory by two people is possible, in order to collect information about the objects and their condition. A sample is representative when it has the same characteristics as the population studied. In the case of a very small population it is difficult to obtain representative results: here the sample should be almost equal to the total population. Therefore significant work must be done prior to assessment to properly identify the characteristics of the mother population. In the absence of sufficient representativeness, the results obtained from a sample cannot be generalized to the population being studied.