The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties
US National Park Service
The four treatment approaches - preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, reconstruction - plus the full illustrated guidelines as free PDFs. Because the Standards are regulatory under 36 CFR 67, they define what counts as an acceptable intervention on a US historic building. Gives the mental model - choose a treatment first, then judge every intervention against it.
More resources on Heritage Conservation
Historic England
The public body that protects and promotes England's built environment. Publishes extensive free guidance on lime mortar, structural timber assessment, planning for listed buildings, and conservation practice.
Conservation of Historic Buildings by Bernard Feilden (3rd edition, Routledge)
The standard text for heritage and conservation architecture — materials, legislation, ethics, and structural assessment of historic buildings. Required reading for anyone working on listed structures.
Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice (3rd edition)
The standard US survey text: movement history, architectural style identification, historical research and documentation methods, National Register nomination, local design review, tax credits and easements, and the economics of adaptive reuse - with case studies throughout.
A History of Architectural Conservation (2nd edition)
Traces how conservation thinking formed - Renaissance repairs, Viollet-le-Duc's stylistic unity, Ruskin and Morris, Riegl's age-value, Boito's compromise - through to modern charters. Explains why current doctrine forbids conjectural restoration and treats documented authenticity as the test. The one book that makes the charters intelligible rather than arbitrary.
SPAB Technical Advice Notes
Free downloadable notes on lime mortars, damp and breathability, timber decay, patch repair versus replacement, and energy upgrades to solid-wall buildings, written from the conservative-repair tradition that treats replacement as failure rather than progress. Complements the NPS briefs with pre-industrial European construction - lime, solid walls, moisture behaviour - where US guidance is thinnest.
Managing World Heritage (World Heritage Resource Manual, 2026)
The 2026 resource manual that merges and supersedes the separate cultural (2013) and natural (2012) guides. Sets out heritage management systems end to end - legal frameworks, planning cycles, stakeholder governance, monitoring - and how climate and development pressures reshape them.