About Heritage Conservation Review — Newsroom, Mission & Editorial Standards

Where we came from

A newsroom built around a gap

In 2014, Dr. Salwa Mansour left a fourteen-year career as a practising conservator at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir and founded this publication from a single desk in a Zamalek apartment. The observation that drove her was direct and uncomfortable: Egypt possessed some of the most technically demanding conservation work in the world, happening every day in climate-controlled laboratories across Cairo and the provinces, and almost none of it reached the public. Announcements would arrive from official sources describing a gallery "restored" or a collection "treated," but the actual decisions — what materials were used, which treatments were reversible, what was lost in the process — were nowhere. She had spent fourteen years inside those decisions and knew their weight. She wanted readers to know it too.

The earliest issues were emailed to around 300 subscribers drawn from contacts in the Egyptian conservation community, a few international colleagues and readers who had stumbled across early web posts. Within two years, the subscription list had passed 4,000 and the newsroom had expanded from one person to a small team, each of them coming from a background in conservation, Egyptology or specialist arts journalism. That foundation — editorial staff who understand what they are looking at — remains the single thing that most distinguishes our coverage from general culture journalism. When Hesham Adib writes about a consolidation treatment on a Ramesside relief, he knows what the alternatives were, and what choosing one entailed.

From the beginning, reader subscriptions were the only revenue model considered. Accepting institutional funding from the museums or ministries we cover would create conflicts that no editorial policy could reliably neutralise. Advertising from the heritage tourism sector would do the same. Independence is not a marketing position here; it is a structural condition without which honest coverage of difficult decisions is not possible. The subscription model means we are answerable to readers, and that accountability runs in one direction only.

The Heritage Conservation Review newsroom at 6 Brazil Street, Zamalek, Cairo

What we set out to do

Mission and scope

We cover conservation as a discipline — the daily practical work of keeping fragile objects stable — not as a cultural amenity.

The mission of Heritage Conservation Review is to produce accurate, technically grounded, contextually honest journalism about how Egypt's museum collections are cared for. That scope is narrower than it might appear. We do not cover Egyptology as an archaeological field. We do not report on tourism policy or visitor numbers except where those intersect directly with conservation conditions. We cover the people and institutions responsible for keeping objects stable, the methods they apply, the facilities in which they work, and the decisions — sometimes difficult, sometimes controversial — that conservation practice requires.

In practice this means sustained attention to the Grand Egyptian Museum's conservation centre in Giza, the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Fustat, and the network of regional museums in Luxor, Aswan, Alexandria, Sohag, Ismailia and elsewhere. It means tracking individual projects across months or years, returning to the same gallery or the same laboratory as conditions change. It means speaking with conservators not only when a project is complete and presentable, but during the uncertain middle stages when the prognosis is still unclear.

We also cover the international dimension of Egypt's conservation landscape — the cooperative agreements with the Getty Conservation Institute, the British Museum, the Louvre-Abu Dhabi network, and the German Archaeological Institute, among others — both as practical journalism and because the flows of expertise, technology and funding that those partnerships represent are themselves part of the story of how Egypt chooses to care for its heritage. Read more about what each coverage area involves on our reporting sections page.

Exhibition coverage sits alongside conservation coverage rather than replacing it. When a newly treated object goes on display, the exhibition is the public face of a conservation project, and we treat it as such — describing not only what visitors will see but what went into making it visible. Exhibition previews link to our current exhibitions desk; longer conservation histories appear in the restoration projects section.

How we work

Editorial method and ethics

01

Access on conservators' terms

We do not pay for access and we do not trade favourable coverage for it. When a conservator or institution allows us into a working laboratory, they do so knowing our editorial independence is non-negotiable. We respect embargoes on sensitive or unfinished work — partly because doing so is the right thing and partly because it is the only way to preserve the long-term trust on which access depends. We make clear in any published piece what we were and were not allowed to see, so readers can calibrate accordingly.

02

Technical accuracy before narrative

Every piece that describes a conservation treatment or method is checked against current professional literature and, where possible, reviewed by a practising conservator before publication. We use accepted technical vocabulary — consolidant, reversibility, inpainting, relative humidity — not because it signals expertise but because imprecise language creates real confusion for readers who may be students, practitioners or policymakers. When we simplify, we say so. When something is disputed within the conservation community, we say that too.

03

Correction is not optional

We correct factual errors prominently and promptly. The correction appears in the same location as the original error, and we keep a log of corrections accessible from our editorial standards page. We do not delete erroneous text; we strike it and replace it with the corrected version, with a datestamp. Readers — particularly those who use our reporting for professional or academic purposes — need to be able to trust that what they read today will not silently change tomorrow.

04

Institutional relationships, disclosed

Over twelve years of coverage, we have developed ongoing working relationships with several of the institutions we report on. We disclose those relationships in relevant articles. Editorial decisions — what to cover, how to frame it, what sources to seek — are made independently of those relationships. Any staff member who has a formal consultancy or advisory role with an institution we cover recuses from editorial decisions on that institution. These are not difficult rules to follow; they are simply the minimum required to make independent coverage credible.

The team

Who produces the coverage

A small editorial team with practitioner backgrounds in conservation, Egyptology and specialist journalism.

Founder & Editor

Dr. Salwa Mansour

Dr. Mansour spent fourteen years as a practising objects conservator at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir, working across a range of material types including wood, gilded surfaces, painted cartonnage and stone. She holds a doctorate in conservation science from Cairo University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, where her research focused on consolidant behaviour in high-humidity environments — conditions directly relevant to the Nile Delta site collections she would later cover as a journalist. She left practice in 2014 to found this publication, reasoning that her knowledge was more useful to a public audience than to an institution that already had it. Her own editorial work ranges across conservation ethics, institutional policy, and the long-form profiles of individual objects and the people who care for them. She is the final editorial authority on all pieces published under the Heritage Conservation Review name, and her decisions are not subject to commercial review.

Restoration Desk

Hesham Adib

Hesham Adib joined the newsroom in 2017 after six years working as a site conservator on excavations in the Eastern Desert and a brief stint as a conservation technician on the Grand Egyptian Museum's pre-opening stabilisation programme. His hands-on experience with stone and metal conservation — two of the most technically demanding material categories in Egyptian collections, given the prevalence of corroded metalwork, sandstone reliefs in variable conditions, and polychromed limestone — gives his reporting a precision that is difficult to fake. Hesham's desk covers everything that falls under active conservation treatment: the GEM laboratories, the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir's ongoing gallery-by-gallery refurbishment, and the specialist projects at provincial sites that rarely attract outside attention. He has built a network of working conservators across six governorates who contact him when a project reaches a stage that the public should know about. His reporting on the stabilisation of the Akhenaten-period reliefs at the Luxor Museum in 2023 was cited by three international conservation journals. He also writes for our conservation methods section on the technical side of field practice.

Exhibitions Editor

Nada Roushdy

Nada Roushdy came to the newsroom from a background in museum studies, having spent four years as an assistant curator at the NMEC before moving into specialist arts writing. Her focus is the public-facing dimension of conservation work: what happens when a treated object reaches a gallery and how the decisions made in the laboratory translate — or fail to translate — into what visitors actually understand. She attends press previews across Cairo and maintains contact with curators at the major national institutions, but her most valued reporting is the gallery visit conducted six or twelve months after an opening, when the crowds have thinned and the interpretive choices of an exhibition can be assessed more honestly. Nada also tracks international temporary exhibitions that travel to Egypt and the loans that Egyptian institutions send abroad, keeping readers informed about the logistical and conservation challenges that international movement of fragile objects involves. Her current exhibitions desk is updated on a rolling basis. She is the primary contact for institutions that wish to notify us of upcoming openings.

Digital Archive

Tarek Lewis

Tarek Lewis manages the newsroom's digital archive and leads coverage of the fast-developing intersection between conservation practice and digital documentation — the use of photogrammetry, RTI (reflectance transformation imaging), multispectral imaging and 3D scanning to record condition states and support treatment decisions. He holds degrees in information science and heritage studies from Alexandria University and the American University in Cairo respectively, and spent three years building a photographic archive for a private Egyptological collection before joining Heritage Conservation Review in 2019. His work on the GEM's digital documentation programme — how thousands of Tutankhamun objects were scanned, modelled and recorded before and after treatment — set a new standard for how we write about archival methods at the newsroom. Beyond digital subjects, Tarek maintains our internal archive of over twelve years of published material, the image library of conservation photography that accompanies long-term projects, and the corrections log. He also handles institutional and multi-seat subscription inquiries on behalf of the newsroom. Readers interested in how we handle data should consult the behind the scenes section he edits.

Twelve years of coverage

How we have grown

From a single email list to the most detailed English-language archive of Egyptian museum conservation reporting.

Year	Milestone
2014	Founded by Dr. Salwa Mansour at 6 Brazil Street, Zamalek. First issue emailed to 300 subscribers. Coverage focused on Egyptian Museum Tahrir's ongoing Old Kingdom gallery refurbishment.
2015	First on-site report from inside a working conservation laboratory — the textile conservation unit at the Egyptian Museum. Subscriber list passes 2,000.
2016	Launch of the website. Subscriber list passes 4,000. First coverage of Grand Egyptian Museum construction-phase conservation planning.
2017	Hesham Adib joins the restoration desk. First multi-part series: six months embedded with the Luxor Museum conservation team during a major gallery rehang.
2018	First institutional subscriptions sold to three university libraries in Egypt. Coverage expanded to include regional museums outside Cairo for the first time systematically.
2019	Tarek Lewis joins as digital archive editor. Launch of long-form digital documentation coverage alongside the GEM's accelerating pre-opening programme.
2020	Coverage of Egyptian museums' conservation work during extended COVID-19 closures: climate monitoring, pest management, backlog treatment projects. Subscriber list passes 11,000.
2021	Nada Roushdy joins as exhibitions editor. Full archive restructured and made searchable by institution, material type and date.
2022	First accredited press access to GEM conservation centre. Coverage of the Tutankhamun collection stabilisation published in three extended reports.
2023	Hesham Adib's reporting on Luxor Museum reliefs cited by three international conservation journals. Institutional subscriptions extended to fifteen university and museum libraries.
2024	Grand Egyptian Museum soft opens. Heritage Conservation Review publishes the most detailed English-language account of the conservation infrastructure behind the opening. Subscriber list passes 19,000.
2025–2026	Expanded coverage of NMEC's ongoing acquisitions programme and the first systematic reporting on stone conservation at the Karnak Open-Air Museum. Archive reaches over 1,400 published articles across 38 institutions.

By the numbers

What twelve years of independent coverage looks like

1,400+

Articles published

Every piece in the archive is accessible to Supporter subscribers and to institutional licence holders. The core reporting from the past two years is freely available to all readers without registration. Our archive is the most extensive English-language record of Egyptian museum conservation practice in independent journalism.

38

Institutions covered

Across the twelve years, we have published sustained coverage of 38 distinct museums and heritage institutions in Egypt — from the Grand Egyptian Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir to the Nubian Museum in Aswan, the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria and the Sohag National Museum. No institution is covered in exchange for access or funding.

19,000+

Subscribers

Readers include conservators, Egyptologists, museum professionals, students in conservation and heritage programmes, and general readers with a serious interest in how cultural heritage is maintained. Institutional subscribers include university libraries in Egypt, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, and three national museum libraries.

2014

Founded, Zamalek

We have operated continuously from the same address in Zamalek for twelve years. Our independence is a structural condition, not a claim, and the history of our funding model — reader subscriptions only, no institutional or advertising revenue — can be verified in our published accounts, available on request from the newsroom.

How to use our reporting

Citation and reuse

We are cited frequently by students, researchers and practitioners in conservation and heritage studies, and we encourage that use. When citing Heritage Conservation Review, please use the author's name, article title, publication name, and publication date. The preferred format for academic citation is: Author Last, First. "Article Title." Heritage Conservation Review, Day Month Year. URL.

Short quotations with attribution are permitted without prior permission. Republication of full articles requires written permission from the newsroom at [email protected]. We grant permission readily for educational and non-commercial purposes; commercial republication is assessed on a case-by-case basis. Educators who wish to use our material regularly should consider the institutional subscription, which includes an educational licence for assigned readings and classroom use. Details are on the subscriptions page.

Conservators, museum professionals and researchers who believe a project they are working on merits coverage are welcome to contact Hesham Adib (restoration projects, conservation methods) or Nada Roushdy (exhibitions, openings) via the main newsroom address. We do not guarantee coverage, and editorial decisions are ours alone, but we read every message and respond to those that describe projects that fit our scope. More on the work we cover can be found on the reporting sections page, and our restoration projects and artefact spotlight sections give a sense of the depth we aim for.

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