Refers to the discipline involving treatment, preventive care, and research directed toward the long-term safekeeping of cultural and natural heritage. For actions taken to prevent further changes or deterioration in objects, sites, or structures, see "preservation," and for changes made to an object or structure so that it will closely approximate its state at a specific past time, see "restoration (process)." Art & Architecture Thesaurus Salvador Munoz Vinas defines conservation as: 1. Conservation in a narrow sense: conservation as opposed to 'restoration'; the keep activity as described by McGilvray: "We really have only three alternatives in dealing with an existing historic resource: we can keep it, we can change it or we can destroy it. (A fourth alternative, to return a historic resource, involves a decision to recreate something that was previously destroyed)". [q, McGilvray, 1988]. 2. Conservation in a broad sense: conservation as the sum of the activities included in sense 1 plus restoration and other possibly related activities. (The latter definition is used by Munoz Vinas in his book Contemporary Conservation, ed.) [...] Two key features of the conservation profession are its closeness to the conservation object and its specificity. Conservators are usually in very close contact with the object, in close physical proximity. [But] The profession of conservation is not equivalent to the general activity of conservation: 'conservators' conservation' is not equivalent to conservation in a general sense. Conservation, in this broad sense, has diffuse boundaries, since it may involve many different fields with a direct impact on the conservation object. The profession of the conservator, on the other hand, is a much more precisely defined activity: it deals with some very specific technicalities, while non-conservators' conservation deals with other technicalities within many varied fields (law, tourism, politics, budget allocation, social research, etc.). (p) Munoz Vinas, 2005, p. 14, p. 10