Tuesday, January 11, 2011

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 comments:

jchurch said...

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"

Heather Brown said...

Ooooh, that looks like a good one! Thanks, Jason!

jchurch said...

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.

Unknown said...

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.