Brief description of the PhD project on the subject of collaboration between Curators and Paintings Conservators.
The project will examine how curators and paintings conservators have collaborated over time in different countries and museums; museum policies (on various subjects such as treatments, exhibitions etc.), and how organizational structures, payment structures, forms of education etc., may have affected the development of collaboration.
The survey will help to explore how collaboration between painting conservators and curators functions today. If possible, a comparative study with one or two of the other material groups will also be presented.
The PhD project will primarily study collaboration in Western Europe, USA and Australia. Great Britain, the United States and France will be looked at in greater detail.
The aim of the project is to improve the understanding of why or why not collaboration exists, with a view towards furthering its development. Increased collaboration and understanding between professionals could provide the conditions for greater professional achievements in each field, but more than this, it can result in better and more interesting work environments for the majority of those concerned.
Survey design and questions
The survey is designed to answer a number of hypotheses which will be explained in the final report(s). Some questions may therefore seem out of context.
Other questions may also seem irrelevant or strangely formulated. Please bear in mind that the survey is designed for many cultures and employment situations.
The survey was designed through the course of interviewing a number of curators and conservator-restorers in six different countries. In these interviews, questions pertaining to physical distance, salary, organizational structure etc., all came up as factors that could influence the way we collaborate. These issues have been reflected in the survey questions.
Conservation and Curatorial specialties
Both curators and conservator-restorers often specialize in a time period or material (or both). Sometimes this is very specific, but in order to ease the collection of data, it was necessary to use quite broad groupings.
Education
In the questions on education, conservation accreditation has not been mentioned.
So far relatively few countries have accreditation schemes in place. How accreditation influences the collaboration between curators and conservators, is a question that I feel warrants a separate study. Any comments on this subject are welcome and can be sent to m-v-m@online.no
Collecting the responses
The survey is conducted through a survey sight called Survey Monkey witch has also been used by the American Institute for Conservation (AIC).
Home page: http://www.surveymonkey.com/
“SurveyMonkey utilizes some of the most advanced technology for Internet security commercially available today. When a user accesses secured areas of our site, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology protects user information using both server authentication and data encryption, ensuring that user data is safe, secure, and available only to authorized persons.” (From Survey Monkey security statement 28 July, 2010)
The responses are anonymous. The only personal information I can gather is the time the survey was taken (information from the survey sight), your speciality, and the country where you work (obligatory questions).
When collecting the statistical data incomplete survey entries may need to be discarded. I therefore request that you try to be as complete as possible.
