The purpose of this booklet is to set down standards for the museum care of photographic collcections, and to provide guidance on the interpretation of those standards. It aims to include photographs as historic artefacts as well as photographs as images. It also covers film, video and electronic images, though in rather less detail. It does not cover equipment such as cameras, projectors, etc. To draft this booklet, the Museums & Galleries Commission drew together a group of practising curators, archivists and conservators, and this publication is the result of their work. The standards represent a consensus of current professional opinion of best practice every museum should aspire to reach. Aspire is the key word. We take the pragmatic view that not all museums will be able to achieve all of them in the short-term. We hope, however, that every museum will work actively towards them. There exist a variety of standards, both national and international, that relate to photographic materials. These include British Standards, ISO and ANSI. Research on the subject is being undertaken around the world and the result is that the standards themselves are continually being revised and updated. To many the situation is confusing and the various standards appear, on occasion, to offer contradictory advice. We have endeavoured in this publication to incorporate the common elements from these standards and combined this with the knowledge of expert advisers who between them have an immense amount of practical experience of managing and preserving collections of photographic materials of all types.