The AIC certainly is moving ahead with its investigation into certification
of conservators. Although this topic is embroiled in some controversy, the
AIC Board received a strong mandate from the membership at last year's
annual meeting in St. Louis to evaluate certification.  The AIC has had a
long history of trying to deal with certification, including a brief period
in which certification actually existed, and they have decided to look into
it again.  A Certification Task Force will be working with other AIC
Committees and Task Forces to move this forward with broad participation.
The January 2000 issue of the AIC News includes the latest Strategic Plan
for 2000-2003, in which the first goal is to Develop and Maintain
Professional Standards (through the Code of Ethics and Guidelines for
Practice) that help define and guide the field of conservation; and a key
strategy will be to "Assess the viability of professional certification and
decide whether to implement a certification program."  This issue is far
from settled, and AIC is simply committed to a continuing study.

Bruce Popkin


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip Cryan Marshall [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 9:54 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Certification / licensing
>
> Having a low profile, professionally speaking  -- as compared with , say,
> architects -- may help some conservators with better insurance rates. But
> it
> may not help our practice, or the buildings we serve... in the long run.
>
> Having certification? We hardly have standards we can refer to! In
> thirty-something years, APT has not come up with anything to refer to, and
> I
> don't see any committee (http://www.apti.org/cmte.html) representing the
> cause. The best stuff out there seems to be AIC's code of Ethics and
> Guideline for Practice (http://aic.stanford.edu/pubs/ethics.html).
>
> Indeed, it seems to be time to bring up the subject. The last time I gave
> it
> any consideration, in 1986 in "Are architecural conservators worth their
> salt?" (http://gamma.rwu.edu/users/pcm/pub/salt.html), I was digging up
> references from the late 70s and early 80s.
>
> Who knows of recent work?
>
> Philip
>
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