Editorial

Abstract

The final issue of the 2022 volume of the journal begins with three articles that in their own ways address the perennial question of what kinds of skills educators should emphasise in their curricula for teaching conservation. Robyn Sloggett’s article, ‘Conservation skills’, takes the bull by the horns to wrangle out the differences between what educational institutions can and do provide and what employers and other agencies involved in conservation might be expected to contribute towards. Against the notion that graduates somehow lack core competencies in ‘treatment skills’—as has variously been suggested in recent years—Sloggett argues that contemporary conservation skills have been reconfigured by a technical, social and intellectual pluralism, and embedding this in the curriculum is the real challenge for conservation education to advance in the twenty-first century. Sloggett’s argument is followed by Salvador Muñoz Viñas’, ‘Conservation science, conservation practice and the conservator’s knowledge: a naïve exploration’, in which he suggests that in making decisions about treatments conservators draw on a reservoir of tacit knowledge which can only be developed in the workplace rather than in an educational setting. He argues that even where conservation is made more ‘factual’ through science such an approach is always redundant in the decisionmaking that conservators typically execute when caring for something. To illustrate this he presents a case study and navigates 42 treatmentrelated questions to demonstrate how science proves insufficient in answering any of them. He concludes that it is the tacit build up of experience, primed in training but developed in the workplace, that allows the conservator to answer such questions and concomitantly moves the individual along the novice-to-expert axis. That skills and know-how are best developed in the workplace is further corroborated by Grace Barrand and Marcelle Scott’s contribution, ‘Targeting specialist skills through Work-Integrated Learning: a case study in frames conservation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’. Progression along the novice-to-expert axis is played out across Barrand’s structured mentorship at AGNSW where her skills were actively developed in a series of tasks designed by staff in the frames conservation department. Using a Work-Integrated Learning approach over 12 months they targeted developing Barrand’s cognitive skills such as muscle memory and pattern recognition to consolidate and improve her professional competencies. The positive results suggest support for Sloggett’s argument for more structured input from industry and offer an industry relevant training model for others to adapt to address any gaps they see in the skillset of their new employees. The fourth article, Cancy Chu, Sarah Bunn, Melanie Barrett and Petronella Nel’s ‘Investigating the efficacy of interleaving materials in the preservation of plasticised PVC slip-cover notebooks in Yang Zhichao’s artwork Chinese Bible’ looks at some of the science behind the problem of plasticised poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC-P) degradation. From a case study of the Chinese artist Yang Zhichao’s 2009 artwork, Chinese Bible, which includes hundreds of PVC-P covered notebooks, three materials— Mylar®, Hollytex® and buffered tissue—were interleaved within the notebooks and the whole stack artificially aged to model their storage conJournal of the Institute of Conservation, 2022 Vol. 45, No. 3, 155–156, https://doi.org/10.1080/19455224.2022.2130548