Curator Offers Tips for Home Archivists : * Lifestyles: Family heirlooms are treasured or stored in many homes. Some simple steps can assure their preservation.

Family heirlooms in many homes are displayed and enjoyed. In others, they are squirreled away in attics or basements in the belief that they are better left untouched.

There is merit in both practices--but only with proper care.

Consider the 55-year-old wedding gown of Lawrence Reger’s mother. After her death, Reger and his sister found the gown wrapped in tissue paper and stored in the attic.

“It was so brittle we had to throw it away,” recounts Reger, president of the National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Property in Washington. “It wasn’t important enough for a museum, but it was important to the family. Just packing it in acid-free tissue would have saved it.”

Although most heirlooms will never see a museum, there’s a move to get families to think more like museum conservators, Reger says.

“Conservatively speaking, 80% of everything in museums and historic societies now was originally in private hands,” he says. So it’s worthwhile to teach people how to care for their treasures.

The interest in conservation is also riding on the coattails of the movement to preserve the environment, says Arthur Beale, director of research at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

“People see both as important to us for different reasons,” he says. “We are putting much greater emphasis on preventive measures, and conservation includes preservation, examination and restoration.”

Beale was a consultant on a new book, “Caring for Your Collections.” With advice from conservation experts in many fields, the book is meant to help the layman care for such family artifacts as decorative objects, textiles, old documents, photographs, furniture and paintings that are deteriorating unobserved in many households.

To arrest the decay, make sure they are displayed or stored safely, Beale advises.

A short list of musts includes keeping cherished items out of direct sunlight and harsh lighting and keeping them away from heat sources and out of direct paths that could lead to accidental breakage. Use putty, or so-called museum wax, to secure a breakable object to the shelf.

Most well-equipped art supply stores will have museum wax and a number of other products for conservation.

When your budget permits, Beale suggests replacing standard mounting materials for photographs and documents with archival quality materials like acid-free paper and ultraviolet-resistant plexiglass.

If you have archives in your attic, or anything you consider important, remove them. Store the stuff, instead, in a closet where temperature and humidity are more stable. If deterioration has already begun, don’t try to remedy it yourself.

“There is a great distinction between what a conservator can do and what the individual can do,” Beale says. “The biggest enemy of cultural property is lack of knowledge, and undoing bad restorations is what most conservators spend most of their time doing.”