Meg Craft discusses AIC

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.