This is a unique institution, with a unique opportunity and responsibility. One of my hypotheses was that we needed to get more people into conservation. But when we got out there we found that we needed to increase the demand for conservation before increasing the supply, and so what seemed to be more compelling was an appreciation of the need for conservation and opportunities for conservators to advance their skills. We also looked at Art and Archaeology Technical Abstracts , which was struggling at the time. It was obvious that most conservation professionals had no way of either sharing their experiences with others or accessing what others had done.
Traditional conservators are basically bench people.
They like to do rather than write about or communicate what they've done. That seemed to be an area where there was a genuine need. It was also clear that there was inadequate work being done in the application of science to conservation in an environment in which the object and its context were central. When we began searching for a director, we found polarization within the field between, say, hands-on conservators and people dedicated to the scientific side, as well as differences between the kind of apprenticeship training that occurs in Europe and the more formal training generally found in this country. Conservation was not a field that had a cohesiveness to it, and we were concerned about that.