Dear Madame,

I am sending this email as I am searching for someone who is willing to take the position of chief editor of “Conservation-Update”. “Conservation Update” is the periodical of the European Research Centre for Book and Paper Conservation-Restoration, which you are most probably already familiar with, via our representatives in over 30 countries. This would be the webpage:

https://conservationupdate.com/

Together with its forerunner journal, the ERC Newsletter, which had a truly misleading name, as it was more of a periodical than what we actually call a newsletter today, has been in existence now for over 10 years. “Conservation-Update“ is a peer-reviewed periodical, with an ISSN Number and DOIs, both for the issue and the individual papers. It is listed in the Getty database and in MuLiBiNe. The periodical is run by a truly international team, and only the three proofreaders are from the UK. The design is taken care of by a conservator who had previously finished her design studies. The webpage was made and is mantained by a computer scientist from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. But we offer even more: the journal is open access and is available for free. This is very rare, if not unique, and is only made possible due to the fact that all colleagues work on a voluntary basis.

Since this year we announced topics for the 2 issues per year, which has fostered a very positive response leading to an Indonesian special issue, 1/2022. Therefore, we decided to announce the topic for the second issue of 2022: An issue, which in particular welcomes papers which show the peaceful cross-border co-operation in the course of conservation activities of any kind.

Due to long Covid and recent political developments we lost some colleagues in the team, in particular all three chief editors at once. For this reason, we are looking for colleagues who want to dedicate themselves for this work.

Being a chief editor demands the ability to take responsibility, and also requires some experience in the field. However, the ERC board is still there to assist. In particular if young colleagues are interested in this work, we are very prepared to help and give all the necessary support.

As I said above, the work is unpaid, but it gives a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to work in our really good team and it is also inspiring to bring in new papers and design the next topics for the upcoming issues. I am also sure that it would be a great prospect and motivation for young colleagues to add to their CV.

We ask you to be so kind and disseminate this call in your community. We are happy to receive mails by anyone interested to drpatriciaengel@gmail.com

sincerely yours

Patricia Engel