Professional qualifications

Egad!!!!  My comment on job offerings and program grad requirements
returned a scad of inquiries from students trying to chose programs
to go into as well as students in programs applying for internships
and jobs.

It seems that a lot of people want to know how to evaluate the
programs, how to compare them and how to determine how their program
backgrounds affect their job opportunities. This either indicates we
need a mechanism for doing this, or we need to consider some means
of agreeing on how to put the emphasis on the person and their
skills and not the school.  Because I teach part-time in the
university here, I have been engaged trying to evaluate how well our
students do in getting into grad schools and how well our M.A.
students do getting jobs or into Ph.D. programs. One mechanism I
wanted to use was the GREs, but found that this was nearly
impossible (cost and other problems).

What essentially the process does eventually is to turn your
thinking around and I began to ask, how good a job are we doing in
preparing people?  It seems to me that the programs would want to
know this and since I am told that the programs in the USA meet on
an informal basis to discuss issues together perhaps some common
evaluation would be possible?  I recall a meeting at the IIC in
Washington several years ago where a group was discussing teaching
materials in conservation and there were a number of people who were
very interested in common cause, especially Dr. Banik.

I have produced a number of evaluations of the published
conservation literature in years past (eg, "Textbooks in
Conservation: some concerns", Bulletin AICCM, 1989:51-8, v. 15, ns 3
& 4). Perhaps it is time to go beyond the initiative of the NIC's
study, "The History and Future Directions of Conservation Training
in North America" (1984) to an international evaluation of training
goals and achievements.  I know there have been meetings on this,
but I am unaware of any published results, I hope someone can
enlighten me on this.

Niccolo Caldararo
Director and Chief Conservator
Conservation Art Service

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 12:64
                Distributed: Thursday, February 4, 1999
                       Message Id: cdl-12-64-009
                                  ***