Volume 13, Number 2, May 1991, p.2

Jerry Podany will represent WAAC at NIC Meetings

WAAC is a member of NIC, the National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Property. NIC is a private organization, founded in 1973 as NCAC, the National Conservation Advisory Council. NIC presently receives about 75% of its funding from the U.S. Congress. It describes itself as "the umbrella organization dedicated to preserving our Nation's heritage."

Among the programs and projects that NIC has initiated:

Conservation Assessment Program (CAP), which began in 1989. CAP provides grants for conservation assessments. The CAP program is funded by IMS, the Institute for Museum Services.

Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!) This program is a joint venture of NIC and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. Data collected as a result of SOS! will become part of the Inventory of American Sculpture, a computerized database of the national collection of indoor and outdoor sculpture in private and public ownership. Volunteers will be trained to perform inventories and basic condition assessments.

Bay Collections Care Pilot Training Program, a series of course curricula on collections care training. Four courses focus on natural history, fine arts, history and ethnographic and archaeological collections. The Bay Foundation is a private foundation based in New York City. Recently published: Training for Collections Care and Maintenance: A Suggested Curriculum-- Volume I: Archaeology and Ethnography.

Conservation Survey/Assessment Project, a project carried out in cooperation with the Getty Conservation Institute that published The Conservation Assessment: A Tool for Planning, Implementing, and Fundraising.

Collections Care Information Service (CCIS), a project to provide bibliographic references on preventive conservation and collections care. Two publications are: Collections Care: A Basic Reference Shelflist and Collections Care: A Selected Bibliography. The CCIS project was assisted by matching grants from the IMS and the Bay Foundation.

Numerous other projects are also underway or are in the planning stages.

Jerry Podany, Conservator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, has agreed to represent WAAC at NIC Meetings, which he attends as the J. Paul Getty Museum's representative. Although WAAC has been a NIC member for a number of years, we have not usually had representation. At the last NIC meeting in October 1990, Jerry participated in a session called "Emergency Preparedness Response"; he and Robert Bergman, Director of the Walters Art Gallery, spoke on "Defining and Implementing an Emergency Response Plan: The Staff Perspective."

The NIC's address is: NIC; 3299 K Street NW, Suite 403; Washington, DC 20007. Telephone: 202/625-1495.