Not a picture of the business meeting, just lunch! Around the table from lower left: Dana Senge, Khoi Tran, Gille Chaumat, Paolo Dionisi Vici and Susanne Grieve.
WOAM business meeting
This conference in Greenville had some 85 delegates from at least 15 countries, 43 papers (12 of them peer reviewed) and 13 posters. The peer review aspect is interesting. In academia, there is the great need to “publish or perish” but for many people, conference proceedings do not count toward their total of publications. Later, over beers, I had the chance to discuss this with Dutch environmental biologist Michel Vorenhout who explained to me that you get a certain number of points for getting your paper into a journal, or a book by a known publisher that counts (Archetype is one of those publishers, by the way.) And whether or not something counts depends on how often it is cited elsewhere. Science and Nature are the ones that are cited most, so they are worth the most if you get an article in them. Apparently, there is one big company that keeps track of all that and assigns the number value. As far as the WOAM papers are concerned, scientists tend not to take things seriously if they are not peer reviewed, and yet WOAM being a conference proceeding, it doesn’t really count for most folks. So scientists are likely to save their best research for publication somewhere that “counts.” For me, I liked the peer review because I felt like it was double-checking my work for really egregious mistakes before I had to get up in front of people. But with WOAM, there is also the Q&A period of critique and feedback during the sessions that gets published after each article, and this is a sort of peer review. As Cliff Cook said, “Everybody gets to kick the cat.” Having special issues of certain journals could make that work. Conservation and Management of Archaeological Sites is one such journal. But certainly we could not fit in all our papers in one issue, right? If you split it up, this info might be harder to find? People might miss out? As for Archetype, you have to pay them to publish the book, and then buy the book from Archetype. So there is an economic consideration at play there. Some journals, like SHA, can take several years for the findings to be published. The system WOAM has now puts things out faster. Here’s another issue: some people cannot get funding to come to a conference if it is not peer reviewed. One big issue that the group decided to tackle was which back issues of the WOAM conference are still available and who has them. Some are very difficult to find. We might even need volunteers to copy old ones. What if we printed fewer copies, and then put them up on the web for free? What about being on CD? Some folks are opposed to them being on the web for issues like copyright and control. In the world of science, there is a lot of pressure to make info free after three years or less. Folks discuss the idea of trying to put WOAM into JSTOR, where people could by articles one at a time. Studies in Conservation and JAIC are available there. Copyright for WOAM remains with the author, so people could email the author for a copy? Of course, authors don’t live forever. If we put titles of all the articles on the web, Google could find it more easily. All the abstracts are already in BCIN and ATAA.
Then the group discussed issues we plan to think about for the next three years and who would be the point person (mostly a formality for the ICOM-CC) These were:
InSitu Preservation (Michel Vorenhaut)
New Materials for Organic Conservation (Hartmut Kutzke)
Reconservation of Alum in wood etc (Susan Braovac)
Acids/sulfur/iron in organics (Vicki Richards)
PreConservation (post recovery) Storage (Sarah Watkins Kenney)
Materials Characterization, Standardized Assessments of Condition, and Assessments of Degree of Deterioration (Ian Godfrey, Katarini Malea, and David Gregory)
Post Conservation Display and Storage (Emily Williams)
Review of the Wood and Methods from 1987 Study (Elizabeth Peacock)
Challenges in Conservation (kristiane Straetkvern
Looks like there is solid support for the idea of Tara Grant becoming the next coordinator, with Emma Hocker and Khoi Tran being co-coordinators and several other folks being willing to pitch in and help. That will decided at the ICOM meeting in Portugal in 2010. Three places were suggested for a 2013 meeting: Australia, Istanbul, or Germany. The Australians were concerned about getting enough attendance in Australia, it’s such a long way to go and not much of a local audience there. Only about 20% of the room thought they’d be able to go there. The 1987 WOAM in Freemantle (which was a combo with the metals group) was not very well attended, and the proceedings were slim. Going to see the flying ship in Xanten was pretty exciting, but I think things are looking like Istanbul in 2013, and not just because Ufak promised us a belly dancer. But he did promise!
For a review of all the papers and posters at the 2010 WOAM conference, please see my weblog at http://ellencarrlee.wordpress.com.