Aimée L Felton 2012

25 Maintenance management is a nomenclature that describes the constantly evolving philosophy, social attitudes and priorities occurring within the sector of managing change and prolonging the life of historic buildings.Maintenance has regularly divided the opinions of policy-makers, researchers and commentators (EH, 2000, MoH, 2004 and DCMS, 2008) whilst academics that discuss the topic try to apportion blame to poor fiscal incentives, define causes of reticence and identify stages of the process. This area of study is currently experiencing attention since the foundation of Maintain our Heritage in 1999 (refer to section two.two), creating a steady increase in academic literature available. Much of the literature devotes time to defining maintenance, however this creates many conflicts and dichotomies within the field (refer to section one.four for further exploration of definitions). Maintenance falls under the umbrella of conservation, which as a practice contains a combination of philosophy, theory, highly specialised detail and focused academic reviews regarding the most common of construction materials (stone, masonry, timber etc). Literature pertinent to maintenance management of historic buildings is slim due to a reduced priority of the subject within legislation and the construction profession. To an even greater extent, the limited literature available that focuses specifically on historic buildings owned by non-heritage organisations (or as part of mixed property portfolios) is even slimmer. For non-heritage focused organisations both the theoretical and practical knowledge is lacking, in particular there is no resource of concise guidance regarding the specific endeavours of efficient and cost effective historic building maintenance. Maintenance is mentioned in almost all texts regarding conservation of Chapter Three - Literature Review ChapterThree Literature Review THREE Aimee Felton