Sharing knowledge

Niccolo Caldararo <caldararo [at] aol__com> writes

>About 30 years ago Robert Organ proposed an venue for conservators
>to share their work.  He called it the National Institute for
>Conservation.  This institute would preserve all the treatments of
>conservators the world over as a resource to present and future
>conservators.  It would be both an archive and a living facility
>where people could do research and have questions answered about
>what people had done in what situations so that archived reports
>could be mined for decision making evidence.
>...
>I think this site could function much like Robert Organ had hoped
>his NIC would.  People could upload their treatment reports,
>experiments on materials, etc., images of problems and we could all
>download these articles, images and data and discuss problems
>together.

If Niccolo Caldararo's (and Robert Organ's) proposal advances, and
there will be a (presumably restricted) venue where professional
conservators can share with each other detailed reports of their
work, that venue ought to include a signpost pointing to
Conservation OnLine. Because perusing CoOL's searchable archive of
decades of technical communications on the Conservation DistList
could inspire someone to devise a needed new technique--and help
someone else to avoid 'reinventing the wheel.'

While conservators are comparing evolving methodologies of modern
conservation/restoration, we need to be aware also that the ethics
of our field are still evolving. CoOL makes it easy to compare the
Codes of Ethics of many cultural-preservation organizations, by
providing hyperlinks directly to them:

    <URL:http://cool.conservation-us.org/bytopic/ethics/>

Jean D. Portell
(biographer of the late art conservators, Sheldon and Caroline Keck)
13 Garden Place
Brooklyn, NY 11201


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 27:6
                  Distributed: Saturday, July 20, 2013
                        Message Id: cdl-27-6-005
                                  ***