This is an interesting issue with many aspects; scuse me for butting in several times. I think Byron Johnstone said some important things about 'union ticket' endorsement of professional qualifications. It's a matter that's on the mind of Museums Australia (our AAM) right now, in various guises. One rises in the Museums Studies Special Interest Group, where there's been a call to monitor and perhaps assess the plethora of museum studies courses now offered in Australia. Some are known to have no professsional input at all - cases where historians or librarians think they may be able to put more studens bums on seats by offering sexy topics in public history or cultural heritage management. (Well, it's nice to think that our field might be sexy). One means of doing this would be to have Museums Australia endorse approved courses, like the Institute of Architects does, and engineers, and librarians. However, I understand that in the UK, the Museums Association used to run the professional Diploma course, but relinquished it some years ago to the Museum Training Institute, an official body of some kind. Can anyone tell me more about this? Was the training program just too difficult to operate on a more or less volunteer basis, or what? There's another aspect, which has come up in the Education Special Interest Group, and that's Professional Development. Architects and librarians are expected to maintain their professional registration with some committment to ongoing professional training - what about museum people? I mentioned in another contribution to the list on this topic that the training that museum people seek is overwhelmingly in management, computing, even stress management, but not in museology or say, recent developments in collections management or some such. In part I know this is due to the requirements of climbing the job ladder, that you have to move away from a discipline specialisation and into management. But I feel very sad that there are few takers for short courses or even reading courses in the new museology (I know, I tried to get one going). It's an old observation that many discipline specialists in museums feel more in common with other discipline specialists than with their fellow employees in museum X or Y. They identify as specialists rather than as museum people. Why is it so difficult to assert that our profession has a character, a purpose, a worth in its own right? That it has scholarly dimensions that are worth spending time and energy on? Linda Young Cultural Heritage Management University of Canberra [log in to unmask]