News

Five Address Changes

Sky Meadow Bindery (Ursula Hofer, Louise Kuflik and Leah Maneaty) writes: "After almost twelve years on Sky Meadow Road, we've just relocated into the heart of downtown Suffern. Our new studio is a sunny 2,000 square foot loft. Even though we're just four miles down the road, our telephone number had to change also--914/368-2790."

The American Institute for Conservation (AIC) moved on June 28, 1993, and all the numbers are new: 1717 K Street, NW, Suite 301, Washington, DC 20006; 202/452-9545, fax 452-9328.

Designer Bookbinders still has its registered address at 6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, but its address for correspondence is c/o The Secretary, 3 Water St., Llanllechid, Bangor,Gwynedd LL57 3EU, UK.

Leather Conservation News has a new address because its host institution changed its name and moved to a new building. Paul Storch is still the editor and publisher. New address: Objects Conservation Laboratory, Minnesota History Center, 3345 Kellogg Blvd. West, St. Paul, MN 55102-1906; 612/297-5774, fax 296-9916.

Conservation Materials Ltd. is still in Sparks, Nevada, and their zip, phone and fax haven't changed, but they have a new street address: 1275 Kleppe Lane, #10.

ISO Applies its 9000 Series Standards to Itself

The Central Secretariat of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), with its 150-person staff, is applying its 9000 series quality standards to its own operations--not because of pressure from external market pressures, which drive most companies that implement these standards, but because they feel a moral obligation (and perhaps social pressure from people using the standards) to practice what they preach. Like any other organization, ISO will have to find an accredited registrar to shepherd them through the process and decide when they have met all specifications.

Unlike earlier standards, which concerned themselves with factors that were easy to measure, like dimensions of nuts and bolts, today's standards increasingly concern themselves with management practices and are beginning to be applied to services and institutions as well as factories. The ISO, for instance, is an institution that provides a service. It provides the structure and facilitates the development of international standards, and then publishes them. Implementation of the 9000 standards should give everyone there some first-hand knowledge of how well they work in an institution like theirs.

ISO's application of quality standards to management and services is due to the pioneering work of Deming, Juran, and others in the quality movement. Management consultant Peter Drucker wrote in 1966, in The Effective Executive (p. 174), "Effective organizations are not common. They are even rarer than effective executives. . . . Enormous resources are brought together in the modern large business, in the modern large government agency, in the modern large hospital or in the university; yet far too much of the result is mediocrity, far too much is splintering of efforts, far too much is devoted to yesterday or to avoiding decision and action." In 1975, in the introduction to a book entitled Management Control in Nonprofit Organizations, the authors (Robert N. Anthony and Regina Herzlinger) opened by saying, "So far as we know, this is the first book of its type," because it was about neither accounting nor organization theory and behavior. Much ground has been covered since then. One day we may even see boards of regents implementing accountability programs in schools and universities, requiring them to implement ISO quality standards and undergo periodic audits after qualifying to ensure that they do not backslide.