At 11:13 24/04/2003 -0400, you wrote: >I have a very bright undergraduate student who is interested in pursuing a >career in film preservation/restoration. What is the best advice that I >can give him to help him achieve this goal? Unless he is an undergraduate in a science or engineering subject or is extremely determined, to forget it. There are many career paths in film archiving which are suitable for humanities graduates, for which the most suitable route in is a full-time masters' degree in film archiving such as the ones offered by George Eastman House in the US or the University of East Anglia in the UK. But the vast majority of these graduates end up in areas such as acquisitions, cataloguing, access and cultural activity related to moving image collections. The work of preservation and restoration requires first and foremost a knowledge of inorganic chemistry related to cellulose esters, closely followed the chemistry and physics of photography and sound recording and the mechanical and electronics skills related to the equipment used for film-related processes. The overwhelming majority of full-time workers in archival preservation and restoration nowadays are science graduates. I am very unusual in being formally qualified in humanities subjects (my first degree and doctorate are both in history, whilst my MA is in film archiving from East Anglia) but having also worked in technical jobs in the film industry part-time (first as a cinema projectionist, then as a projection engineer and finally in a lab) to pay for it, and my technical knowledge is largely self-taught (and self taught by several years of working 90-hour weeks). But I am very much in a minority, and don't think I would stand much chance of obtaining a senior technical position in a major archive - most of these people have PhDs in chemistry, and need them. If he really is determined to pursue a career in this very specialised area of moving image archiving, I would say that his best bet would be to start by taking a further first degree, ideally in chemistry. Leo Dr. Leo Enticknap Director, Northern Region Film and Television Archive School of Arts and Media University of Teesside Middlesbrough TS1 3BA United Kingdom Tel. +44-(0)1642 384022 Fax. +44-(0)1642 384099 Brainfryer: +44-(0)7739 412022 Web: http://www.nrfta.org.uk/ ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu