10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator

Tip #6: Attend conferences, lectures and workshops

Like lab visits, attending educational events can teach you a great deal about conservation, as well as give you an opportunity to meet other conservators, scientists, artists, and museum professionals. Take a look at the calendars of local museums, galleries, universities and conservation guilds to find out what’s happening.

Here’s an example of a conference on photographic materials summarized by Amy Brost.

Professional organizations generally hold an annual conference, which offers a plethora of lectures and workshops…enough to make it worth the trip to another state. AIC’s annual conference will be held in Philadelphia in 2011, and includes a variety of interesting paper topics, courses, and tours of conservation labs (see the schedule here). You can also check the websites of other organizations listed in tip #2 for upcoming conferences and events.

Even for those already in the field of conservation, continuing education is a necessity to stay abreast of current theory and practice. If you read the distlist, you’ll see posts about upcoming events every week, that target a breadth of audiences. Though some can be pricey, there are many talks and webinars that cost absolutely nothing, like this lecture by Carol Mancusi-Ungaro at the Menil Collection in Houston, or the Connecting to Collections webinar series. Just be patient and look around for something that suits you.

4 thoughts on “10 Tips for Becoming a Conservator”

  1. Another great post of tips! One free lecture series that you can view, in person, live on-line, or watch the archive of is The Library of Congress "Topics in Preservation Series" http://www.loc.gov/preserv/tops/schedule.html
    January 13 has Eryl Wentworth talking about AIC and "Strategic Planning for an Evolving Field"

  2. Woops, just found out the the LOC is not going to webstream this lecture. I was told that the recorded lecture will be available on their website in the future.

  3. Thanks Heather and Jason, workshops are a lot of fun, I met Jason at a NCPTT workshop in New Orleans that was a blast (and very educational 🙂

    I found another free conservation workshop that would be great for a pre-program student.

    http://www.bacc.org/ed_wkshop.htm

    It will be traveling around the West coast in 2011.

    I am looking forward to the next tip.

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