This is an interesting and important thread. Thus far, responses have come from the public sector; institutional personel or students. I would like to add a note from an employer. For over a dozen years I employed upwards of 5 staff members. There were always volunteers. Some bright-eyed and awestruck and some damned serious about something or other. In all those years, I offered employment to two volunteers. One accepted employment. The other remained a volunteer for a decade or so. The volunteers who stick, and who do a good job year after year, are typically retired people. If they are drawn to conservation they have a set of attitudes which work well at the bench. They are interested in continuing education and have hand/tool skills developed in previous work which are applicable. Over the years, there have been interns from various university programs who were interested in short-term, defined-goal projects and needed to acquire certain skills, and those people were accomodated in the lab. There have been some people who wanted to augment skills, and that was good. But, in the main, I preferred to put people on the payroll. There were two main reasons for that. If I believed that they were capable of being trained to work on a client's property, then they were worth a salary. If they did not perform up to a certain standard, it was easier to reprimand and educate an employee than a volunteer. I realize that volunteers are part of the life blood of a non-profit institution. What I whould like to see is a statistic comparing the number of young, energetic, bright-eyed volunteers with the number of salaried museum employees drawn from those ranks. After many years of employing staff, the day came when I realized that I was paying half of an annual salary to a person who filled out forms for various city, county, state, and federal agencies, and that I was spending a fair amount of my time reviewing those forms before signing them and signing the checks which always accompanied them. Just another data point Jack C.Thompson Thompson Conservation Lab Portland, OR [log in to unmask]