A recent thread began with the cost of living in NYC vis-a-vis museum salaries and led to a "larger issue" of salaries in cultural professions. As noted, part of the problem is that some employers, usually private non-profit organizations, simply don't have the money to offer adequate compensation. This raises the issue of whether or not, if those organizations can't offer adequate salaries, are the boards of trustees of the organizations meeting their responsibilities? We often talk about the responsibilities of boards for the collections with which they have been entrusted. How often do we talk about the responsibilities of boards for the people they employ? A second issue is that the expertise required to do a profession job as an historian, or as a museum staffer, or as a museum or historical agency administrator is not well understood by the general public or by "human resource" professionals. In my opinion, this is because some members of the general public and personnel classifiers think that a professional historian or museum staffer needs no more than the skills required to write a high school history paper. There is also the fact that since most of us like our work, we are too often willing to work for less than appropriate wages, thereby keeping the salary scale low. Our professional organizations (AASLH, AAM, etc.) occasionally conduct salary surveys. Is anyone aware of a survey that compares compensation for historian, curator, and similar positions with compensation for positions in other fields that require similar academic preparation and professional expertise and experience? William S. Hanable