In this Issue

• Lead articles: ECPN and PSG
• From the President
• JAIC News
• Health & Safety
• New Materials, Research & Resources
• Worth Noting
• Conservation Graduate Programs 
• Committee Reports

ECPN 

Expectations and Realities: A Preview of the 2024 Condition Report of Conservators 

By Stephanie Guidera, Michaela Paulson, and Kaeley Ferguson for the Emerging Conservation Professional Network (ECPN)

In 2022 and 2023, ECPN leadership received an enormous amount of feedback about continuous problems affecting the experiences of emerging conservation professionals (ECPs). Spurred by this, a group of conservators who have served the Emerging Conservation Professionals Network (ECPN) of AIC over the last five years in varying capacities created a series of three surveys devised to capture, record, and share solid data regarding the current ECP experience.

The 2024 AIC Annual Meeting general session titled “Expectations and Realities: The State of Emerging Professionals in the Field” was the culmination of the work of more than 30 volunteers from a range of training backgrounds, current employment circumstances, and career levels, and was designed to address survey responses.

read the full ECPN article here >>

PSG

Easels Exchange: Collaborative Problem-solving with Non-stakeholders 

By Fiona Rutka for Paintings Specialty Group (PSG)

Collaboration is a perennial subject in conservation research (Ramsay-Jolicoeur and Wainwright 1990; Kapelouzou 2012). Recent years have seen a proliferation in conferences, symposiums, and publications dedicated to the topic (Coleman and Wight 2021; Rausch et al. 2022; Brain et al. 2024), and new research will be disseminated at the upcoming 53rd AIC Annual Meeting, themed “What’s Your Story? The Power of Collaborations and Connections.” Generally, the collaborations shared via these platforms are between different types of professionals cooperating on a project, such as conservators of different special-ties working across discipline or conservators working with conservation scientists, artists, or curators. Another area of praxis that has received more attention lately is the collaboration between conservation professionals and the members of communities from which heritage objects under examination or treatment originate (IARC 2019). In these instances, the collaboration discussed is between stakeholders.

read the full PSG article here >>

From the President

Dear Colleagues,

It is officially fall. I work on a university campus, and when the students return for the fall term, they bring a new energy, fresh ideas, and excitement to campus. It is a time that feels hopeful and inspirational, but also busy and intense. This year, fall at AIC feels similar for multiple reasons.

Perhaps the most important of these reasons is the organization’s financial situation, about which the AIC board and staff teams have been messaging over the past month. To summarize very briefly, AIC is predicting a budget deficit for the third year in a row. The two primary reasons for this are that income from membership dues is not keeping up with inflationary increases in expenses, and registration fees for the annual meeting are not completely covering the audio-visual needs of what is now a fully hybrid conference.

read more >>