Kathleen Dardes

Senior Coordinator, Training Program

Photo: Dennis Keeley

Raised in Philadelphia, Ms. Dardes studied archaeology and art history at the University of Pennsylvania. She subsequently went to London to attend the three-year diploma course offered by the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Textile Conservation Centre at Hampton Court.

After receiving a post-graduate diploma in textile conservation, she returned to the United States in 1984, and spent one year at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Conservation. A year as a conservator at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine was followed by two years in the Department of Textiles and Costume at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Ms. Dardes's interest in conservation training was first sparked while working at Saint John the Divine. Her experience in training interns there led her to reflect on the information, skills, and values she was passing on, and her concern with conservation standards and practices increased over time. When she learned of a position in the GCI's Training Program in 1988, she saw it as an opportunity to address conservation's training needs.

Of the many challenges she has faced in her role as Senior Program Coordinator, she is particularly pleased with her participation in developing and coordinating the Institute's preventive conservation course, which encourages conservators to address preventive conservation issues within their museums by taking into account both the technical and organizational factors at work. This year the course is being offered in the United Kingdom for the first time, and Ms. Dardes looks forward to expanding the course to meet preventive conservation needs in other regions.

David Scott

Head, Museum Services, The GCI Scientific Program

Photo: Dennis Keeley

Born in London and educated in chemistry at the University of Reading, Dr. Scott spent his early professional years as an analytical chemist in the public health field. Prompted by an intellectual dissatisfaction with his work and a long-held interest in archaeology that dated back to adolescence, he embarked on a study of archaeological conservation, attending the University of London. There he received his doctorate for research on ancient South American metals.

In 1987, after six years as a lecturer in the Department of Conservation of London's Institute of Archaeology, he took up his present post directing the GCI's Museum Laboratory, which provides analytical and technical support to the conservation services of the J. Paul Getty Museum. This position has been extremely gratifying for Dr. Scott, permitting him to not only continue his research into metals (now including Greek, Roman, and Renaissance bronzes) but also to expand his conservation work into areas such as pigments, furniture, and historic photographs.

He likes the challenge of tackling the variety of conservation issues presented to him by the Institute and by the Museum's conservators and curators, and enjoys the continual education that this assignment requires. In recent years his work has ranged from acquisition of lead isotope data for the Museum's Byzantine silver collection to identifying pigments and binding media employed by Chumash Indians at rock art sites.

Dr. Scott's extensive writings on metals conservation include a book published in 1991 by the Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Metallography and Microstructure of Ancient and Historic Metals. Since 1985 he has served as one of three editors of the journal Studies in Conservation. Currently, he is co-editing a volume of papers from the Ancient and Historic Metals conference cosponsored in 1991 by the Museum and the GCI, as well as editing papers presented at the 1992 Archaeometry Conference.