Category: Topics

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION

The Sheridan Libraries’ Department of Conservation and Preservation is pleased to announce a one-year advanced fellowship in book and paper conservation. Funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Kress Fellow will have a unique opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary conservation program which incorporates advanced book and paper conservation bench work, collaborations with the Homewood Museum, and with the department’s heritage science for conservation project. The Kress Fellow will have the opportunity to work on a wide array of rare books and manuscript materials from the Sheridan Libraries which includes the George Peabody Library, the Garrett Library Collection, and the collections at Homewood Museum. This unique environment will provide the Kress Fellow with a scope of interdisciplinary and inter-institutional engagement fundamental to professional effectiveness and growth.

Since its inception in 1974, the Department of Conservation and Preservation at Johns Hopkins has played a leadership role in providing both conservation educational opportunities and innovation in conservation practice. In addition to working on rare books and manuscripts from the rich collections, the Department is engaged in an active materials science research agenda for book and paper-based collections through its heritage science lab and in collaborations with the Homewood House museum, the Whiting School of Materials Science and Engineering, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, as well as industry partners.

The Sheridan Libraries Kress Conservation Fellowship aims to broaden the experience of post-graduate-level fellow through practical training that introduces state of the art analytical techniques, advanced bench experience, collaboration with curators, and awareness of the historic and philosophical issues concerning the conservation of book and paper collections. The Fellow has have access to an extraordinary array of resources, including the Baltimore Museum of Art (adjacent to the Hopkins campus) and the renowned libraries and museums in the Baltimore/Washington area.

Deadlines:

June 15, 2010: Deadline for receipt of all application materials; incomplete applications will not be considered after this date.
July 1, 2010: Interview of selected candidates.
July 15, 2010: Notification of successful candidate
August 30, 2010: Program begins

Stipend: $25,000 year, includes benefits, health insurance, and $1,500 for travel to conference.

Eligibility: Completion of graduate-level training in conservation; additional courses in material sciences is desirable. Preference is given to those who have completed graduate-level training in conservation, but third year graduate students will also be considered.

Application Procedure: A complete application includes curriculum vitae, a one page single spaced statement summarizing the applicant’s interests and intent in this fellowship and chosen specialization, official transcripts of undergraduate and graduate studies, and three letters of recommendation. Submission of a portfolio of conservation treatments including photo documentation, condition reports, and treatment reports is mandatory. All materials must be submitted in English and electronically.

Please send application materials and supporting documents to:

Sonja K. Jordan-Mowery
Joseph Ruzicka & Marie Ruzicka Feldman
Director of Library Conservation and Preservation
PI, Heritage Science for Conservation
Johns Hopkins University
sjordan@jhu.edu

Will you be attending AIC’s annual meeting next month? Do you like sharing information with your colleagues? Do you take good notes? Are you always online? If so – then we have a job for you!

We are looking for candidates to post on the AIC blog about the content of talks given at the meeting. We are ideally looking for two individuals to share the coverage of talks at each specialty group session. Bloggers will be trained on a short conference call prior to the meeting on how to access and post to the Blog. If you are interested in being considered, please contact the AIC E-editor Rachael Arenstein at Rachael@amartconservation.com.

Recently, the ECPN has expanded their social media network to include a Facebook group. In the survey sent out by AIC asking what members wanted from the ECPN; the vast majority stated that the original Ning site was outdated and they would prefer a Facebook page. Ask and you shall receive.. Emerging Conservation Professionals Network.

The group page is open to anyone who would like to join and there are currently 83 members. The page is also open to allow anyone that wishes to post to the wall, start discussions, post events, and pictures.

The hope is that the Facebook group will give AIC and ECPN members, prospective members, and those just interested in conservation a place to openly and informally chat about events, programs, projects, etc. This is the place to through out questions like; “Does anyone want to share a hotel room at AIC?” or “Who has gone through the graduate program at X and did you have professor X?”.

Remember this is your social media so it only works if you use it. So invite your classmates and friends and start connecting.

“500 Words or Less.” A workshop about writing abstracts or short proposals. 20 April 2010 . 11am US Eastern time (GMT -5) 90 minutes.

More information at http://bit.ly/AWW_410 or http://bit.ly/AWW_410sc

Members of the Emerging Conservation Professionals can claim the discount by noting “ECPN” in the discount code section of the online form.

If 5 or more get together to join, I’ll drop the price further — just email me.

The following are my notes from a meeting with Meg Craft and Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation faculty and students on March 11, 2010.

The meeting began with a brief description of AIC:
It is a membership organization instead of a institutional organization.
There are 3,300 members
supported by a staff of 10
FAIC is a separate organization, AIC is the office and membership portion
Both are non-profit, but the FAIC applies for educational grants, receives donations, while AIC is in a better position for political advocacy. AIC is the only member of FAIC, we are all members of AIC

Current Topics – Environmental Standards

One activity this year is the re-assessment of environmental standards. AIC cannot change or make up the standards, but they can form a committee or a task force to keep everyone informed. The IIC roundtable at the AIC 2010 meeting will give us a litmus test of how everyone feels about changing standards. Sustainability, Economics, protection of objects, need for access, we’ve reached this point by which we need to re-evaluate. AIC can be a resource and a place to put this information about environmental mangement and make it available to all members

CoOL – Conservation OnLine

Cool – COnservation OnLine has been taken over by FAIC. We would like it to be maintained made into a functional and growing resource. There are significant costs to maintain and operate the website. The site needs to be mapped, and there are numerous broken links on the site. If you find a broken link send it to Brett Rogers or Rachel Arenstein at AIC.

Who uses the resources in Cool? Mainly developing countries and conservation programs without library sources use cool as a primary source. AIC is looking to form an international board, and they have a strategic plan. Mapping will not be very expensive, but will require organization. They are looking at putting CoOL in other languages.

Ethics Complaints

There has been an increase in ethics complaints, now more than ½ the membership is in private practice. Meg encouraged students to use a contract for everything, write down changes and risks involved in treatments and have the owner sign the contract before the treatment and if there are changes add these in the margins and initial at the end when the object is returned. Since it is always not possible to predict if your client will like their object after it has been treated, be sure to outline how it will look post-treatment as much as possible.

How to get more involved – thoughts from Meg Craft and the students

The meeting ended with a discussion of how students could be more involved in AIC, Meg suggested joining a specialty group, becoming involved with Angel’s Projects, helping out with the online projects as needed (CoOL, the Wiki), offering to edit JAIC, and/or writing a book review for the JAIC (bonus – you can keep the book! AIC has a stock of books waiting to be reviewed). For the journal information you can contact Brett Rodgers at AIC. It was also mentioned that we may begin a ‘student day’ at the AIC annual meeting which would offer a great opportunity for students to present their work.

Overall, it was a great introduction to AIC and what is currently on the President’s desk. Thanks to Meg for taking time out of your lunch to update us all.

Dear Colleagues,

I am currently teaching an undergraduate class called “Critical Issues in art conservation” to undergraduate students at the Johns Hopkins University. The course looks at issues in the history, ethics and contemporary practice of conservation and tries to grapple with how conservation changes art and artifacts, as well as our interpretations of them. As part of our course, the students contribute to a blog: www.criticalissuesinartconservation.blogspot.com. One student posts a new reflection on the reading for that week and his/her colleagues respond by posting comments to the blogpost. I think that it would be tremendously interesting and exciting to this group of dedicated and serious students if some of the authors of the articles they are reading (and you can find a reading list as a link at the blog) would comment on their blog entries and perhaps suggest weblinks of interest. Part of what I was hoping for in this blog was that it would be an interactive forum for the students, conservators and the general public. I’d be most grateful if you would look at the blog and the reading list, and if the authors we are reading especially (but all are welcome to comment) would write something in response to the blogposts. There is also a little poll that is posted on the blog to get a sense of who is looking at it. If you would kindly take the poll, that would be helpful to understand our audience as well. New student posts appear every Monday, so please do check back!

Also, any suggestions for me on other readings that might be appropriate for undergraduates would be most welcome.

with thanks in advance,
Sanchita Balachandran

Meg Loew Craft, President of AIC and senior objects conservator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, will have a casual lunch discussion at the Winterthur Museum Research Building on March 11, 2010. It will be during lunch, around noon to 1PM.

The WUDPAC graduate students have been invited and anyone in the area is encouraged to attend. The purpose of the lunch discussion is to talk to Meg Craft about her work in AIC and to allow a forum for students to ask questions about AIC, and voice their concerns as emerging conservators.

Written-in questions are encouraged, and if you would like you can ask questions in the comments section of this post, or e-mail questions to me at rose.daly[at]gmail.com. It would be helpful to give a list of questions to Meg Craft before the meeting so she can be better prepared to answer them. A summary of the discussion will be posted on this ECPN blog.

The Education and Training Committee is looking for a current student to serve as a student liaison on our committee. The student liaison term would serve a 1 or 2 year term, depending upon their anticipated graduation, and begin after the 2010 Annual Meeting. Contact the ETC Chair, Jennifer Hain Teper (jhain@illinois.edu) if you are interested.