In 1997, members of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission asked the Pennsylvania State Archives staff to find a way to display the Charter for, at the very least, its March 4 "birthday." State Archives specialists turned to the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA) in Philadelphia, a regional preservation facility which has treated such precious national treasures as the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the second draft of the Declaration of Independence. CCAHA parchment expert Susan Filter examined the Charter and made a critical decision: permanent display was no longer feasible for the fragile three-hundred-year-old document. Rare display under the strictest standards was permissible, but the document first needed stabilization. Restoration was not an option, though. Modern conservation ethics call for leaving an original item as "original" as possible. While reattaching modern parchment to the missing margins and affixing a facsimile of the Great Seal would undoubtedly enhance its appearance, such efforts would inhibit overall understanding of what remains of the original object.
Conservation of historical materials is highly specialized, labor intensive and, therefore, expensive. Costs for stabilizing the Charter amounted to about three thousand dollars a page, or twelve thousand dollars for the entire document. The Pennsylvania Heritage Society came to the rescue and, during fall 1997, not only raised the necessary funds for its immediate care but created an endowment for future maintenance. On October 23, 1997, the Charter was carefully removed from a vault in the State Archives and each page securely placed in transport boxes. A unit of the Pennsylvania State Police, the Bureau of Emergency and Special Operations, usually reserved for the governor and visiting dignitaries, escorted the precious document to the CCAHA in Philadelphia.