North American Graduate Programs in the Conservation of

FOREWORD
It seems appropriate, on the occasion of the Twenty-fifth Conference of
the Association of North American Graduate Programs in the
Conservation of Cultural Property, to reflect upon the very significant
effect of these formal graduate training programs in increasing the professionalism
of the field of conservation as a whole in North America.
My career parallels closely the development of the field, extending from
apprenticeship training in a museum laboratory in the 1950s, through
directing a regional center laboratory and heading its graduate training,
and concluding with twenty years as head of a major museum conservation
laboratory that has had a continuous flow of interns and postgraduate
fellows from graduate training programs in the United States and
abroad. I speak, therefore, from experience.
From their beginnings, the graduate training programs have fostered an
openness and sharing of information among conservators that came as a
breath of fresh air to a field that had traditionally been rather closed and
secretive, perhaps reflecting the insecurity felt by individual practitioners.
This sharing of information between individuals, programs, and laboratories
has been encouraged by the faculty of the various training programs
from the start.
Conservation documentation across the field has markedly improved,
in examination reports, treatment records, and photodocumentation, as a
result of careful training by program faculty. This contrasts with the brief,
if any, descriptions of treatment left by our predecessors earlier in the century.
Students are trained to do thorough examinations before treatment
and to use a wide range of examination techniques, unknown in the earlier
days of the profession. Conservators have become much better problem
solvers because of their training program experience.
Approaches to treatment problems have broadened as a result of more
practitioners seeking solutions through testing. No longer is only one solvent
or one adhesive used to treat most problems. More often, materials
and techniques are tailored to specific treatment problems.
As a result of the more comprehensive examination techniques, much
more is known and understood about artists' materials and methods.
Major catalogues now generally include technical material, and, in fact,
funding agencies often will not support their publication unless they con-
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