AATA

I was in turn saddened by Adrian Tribe's message. It is definitely a
bad thing that trained conservators are paid so little, both for
their personal well-being and for the quality of their work. The
struggle not only for higher personal pay, but for enough support
money to pay for proper supplies, equipment, and reference materials
is a constant one, but conservators have often been so
self-sacrificial that we may as a profession need to change our
tactics. Being modest in one's demands does not gain a person many
brownie points in today's world. AIC is trying in many different
ways to upgrade both actual professionalism in our field and at the
same time boost our standing among related professionals and in the
public eye, and I hope other country's organizations are trying to
do the same.

I don't know who Adrian Tribe works for, but if appropriate, she or
he should consider being a little more pushy; if the quality of work
is being affected by the lack of resources, this is a serious
matter. I have no idea about the state of libraries in the UK as to
inter-library loans, on-line accessibility, etc., but it is
certainly important that the British--and all of us--not give up on
accessibility to written information sources. Perhaps the DistList
could be used to increase access by discussing availability, helping
to share, etc.

As chair of the AIC Publications Committee, I can say that AIC is
trying very hard to get more people to publish---by providing grant
money for people to write books, and by encouraging more submissions
to juried publications. It is indeed disheartening if such material,
once published, has limited circulation because of a lack of funds.
AATA is trying to make better use of limited resources by
encouraging libraries rather than individuals to purchase AATA, but
we all understand that libraries too are suffering from lack of
funding. If conservators in a particular area could get together and
let libraries know that group of them would like certain books or
journals, perhaps that would help.

I would welcome more open discussion of the matter of difficulty of
access to published material; if this is a recurrent problem,
perhaps the professional organizations can find a way to address it.

Barbara Appelbaum

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 9:67
                 Distributed: Thursday, March 28, 1996
                        Message Id: cdl-9-67-002
                                  ***