Dr. Robert Waller Interview

Dr Robert Waller earns the 2025 CAPC Award of Distinction

The CAPC Board of Directors is pleased to announce Dr. Robert Waller as the recipient of the 2025 Award of Distinction. Rob, as most of his colleagues call him, is a longtime CAPC member, and a highly regarded leader in the conservation profession both nationally and internationally. His many achievements and contributions mentioned by his nominators include:

• Decades-long career with the Canadian Museum of Nature. He retired as Chief of Conservation in 2008 and still remains a Research Associate of the Museum.
• PhD in conservation (cultural property risk analysis), Gothenburg University
• Fellow, International Institute for Conservation (IIC)
• Recipient of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) Carolyn Rose Award and member of the Conservation Committee
• Recipient of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) Sheldon and Caroline Keck Award
• President and Senior Risk Analyst, Protect Heritage Corporation
• Has taught conservation science in the Master of Art Conservation program, Queen's University, and online courses in conservation and risk management for Museum Study
• Member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Collections
• Author or co-author of dozens of published research articles, conference papers and book chapters listed on ResearchGate (at least 5 of which were published in the last year alone)

We share the nominators' opinion that Rob's contributions and positive influence on our field simply cannot be overstated and that his wisdom is invariably imparted kindly, gently, and logically and shared collegially and unselfishly in the spirit of the CAC/CAPC Code of Ethics.

Congratulations Rob!

Interview

For the occasion, Dr Waller was interviewed by CAPC Emerging Conservator Grant recipient Alison Moule over coffee in Toronto. Please read the interview transcript below to know more about his career.

Alison Moule: What was your first exposure to the field of conservation? Did you have any early training in art? Or chemistry?

Rob Waller: [Chuckling]. Um, no, my background is science. [My] first degree was in geology and computer science. If I’d had any brains at all, I’d have been rich by now [laughing]. After my second year, I got a summer job at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (NMNS) [now Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN)] in Ottawa, so that was my introduction to museum work. Conservation took a little bit longer… although I was working on conservation-related things, you know… Different ways to clean minerals, and stuff like that. My first job was essentially using a scrub brush to get the mud off the rocks that the curators brought back from their summer trips. It’s like starting in the mail room — starting right at the bottom, which can be healthy, I think. But then, I kind of have a knack for sorting out some chemistry-based methods for doing selective dissolutions. When I say I’ve got a knack, that means I found some recipes from other fields like soil science, and I copied them, but then I was perceived as having some ability for that. There [are] striking preservation issues [in mineral collections]. For an example: silver halides
occur as minerals, right, the basis of the photographic films, they grow in the dark and they occur as minerals, and as soon as they see the light they change, instantaneously. There’s other things, there’s calcium carbonate hexahydrate, that even if it’s in water, it dehydrates if it goes above 10°C, so you can’t shove enough water in there to keep it from dehydrating. There are a lot of bizarre little tricks in mineral collections. There are some incredibly unstable mineral species. That was interesting to me. So that was a bridge to conservation.

AM: Did you go to graduate school? What were your early jobs?

RW: No. No [graduate school]. I just went to a summer job in the NMNS Mineral Sciences Division and, when I got out of university, my girlfriend at the time got a job in Ottawa, I moved to Ottawa with her. And I was going nuts being at home all the time, so I kept bugging the museum to give me a contract, and eventually they did. So I got a contract, and then it didn’t get renewed, so I bugged them some more. I just kept haranguing them until I eventually got a job, and then the government was told to eliminate our museum’s last 13 new hires, so then I lost my job. But eventually I got it back again. We think of today’s struggle to get the positions that we want as an issue of today, but trust me it isn’t. It was the same kind of thing fifty years ago. I think the only reason I got in as a permanent position was I was such a pain in the ass. They figured it was easier to get me a job [laughing].

AM: Who were the first people that you worked with?

RW: So, important early people would have been [John Grant] in the ethnology lab at CCI. He was very welcoming to me at my first IIC-CG meeting in Fredericton. And Ken Macleod, Barbara Ramsay, and Charlie Costain…[Barbara and Charlie] were both, I think, very first year Queens MAC grads, and they were welcoming so I hung around and pestered them. It’s kind of funny, I’m a very shy person, but I can be shameless in clinging, if I need to [laughing]. Early on there was Dave Grattan, Cliff McCawley and so many others.

AM: What philosophies or approaches were you taught during your training and how have they developed throughout your career?

RW: Just be a pest, cling on and never let go [laughing]. Because natural sciences conservation was such a nascent little area of expertise, at that time. At CMN Ridge Williams and Chuck Gruchy were hugely supportive. In the natural science collection care field, people like Carolyn Rose, Steve Williams, Catharine Hawks, John Simmons, were pushing the limits. There were few of us working together to develop natural science collections care. Because we recognized it was just, not even a fetus, but just a little egg of something trying to become a fetal form, we had to look outside [of that field] all the time for things. So we looked to the heritage conservation
field for some ideas. I used to spend a lot of time looking at building stone conservation, although certainly, being a building exposed outdoors is not like being a rare mineral in a cabinet, but you just had to keep looking all around and gathering everything we could. Soil science — I got a lot out of that. And I think that’s carried on throughout my career. I think that’s why I got into risk analysis. At the time, [risk analysis] seemed really detached from our work. In fact, I got a lot of grief over it in our field. It took 10 years to convince much of the field it could
be useful. I guess that’s that character of insinuating myself, being a pest, clinging and not giving up, so, in a way that’s kind of served me well in bringing things from other areas into our work. That was the case for risk analysis and management then more recently work with the brilliant

Jane Henderson on broadening our perspectives and exploring psychological and sociological aspects of our work.

AM: How did you first become involved with the CAPC and how has your relationship with the CAPC developed throughout your career?

RW: I think I first applied to CAPC in the early 80s, at a time when it were still working to establish the very clear entrance requirements and process for admissions. So I had to wait a few years while they were getting that sorted. My motivation was partly because I didn’t have a master’s degree and I felt accreditation would increase my credibility in the museum. But also just to understand for myself if was I really there or was I not really there at all. Right? As a kind of new area or focus for conservation, I just wasn’t sure, is [natural history conservation] really a thing? I’d say it was Charlie Costain and Barb Ramsay who were inspirational and supportive for me at that time.

AM: Are you involved with any other professional associations internationally and if so, how has your experience with the CAPC related to your experience with these
international associations?

RW: Do you want the list? There’s about a dozen.

AM: I think I have the list. You sent me your CV [laughing].

RW: I guess the important ones are not so much the conservation ones, because they’re already linked with our field… The Society for Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), when that was very new, and some conservators with training in ethnographic conservation were getting positions at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and similar places. But, in early years with the SPNHC it was helpful to have the sense of, in air quotes, “what professional conservation was about”, and how we could encourage better communications across those areas.
I’ve been now with the Society for Risk Analysis for 24 years now, and I find that an interesting parallel, in that they do not have an accreditation scheme (Although related societies such as Informs does). For me, CAPC is about not what CAPC can do for me, but what I can do in supporting CAPC to help protect the public and employers from engaging with services that present as conservation but are really not. I feel that we have some social responsibility to step up as professionals and say, there are some aspects of this work that need to be there before the public can feel safe that they’re getting proper conservation service. I think the same thing goes for risk analysis. I’m a thorn in their side about some form of accreditation, but they’re a bit far from that. They have the same issues, the field is diverse… How can you accredit when the field is so diverse? But you there’s some things you can do — I wish we could do more. We can’t make it perfect but we can make it better and I’d be letting society down if I didn’t do my little bit to try.

AM: You are now working as a Risk Analyst. Can you describe your current position and how your career lead you to it?

RW: I was involved in risk analysis and management [for] quite long time before it caught on in the field, so for quite a while, I was almost the only show in town. [I was] visiting a lot of places around the world, to talk about [risk analysis]. And I kind of enjoyed that, but a lot of people back at the shop thought I was on a lark much of the time. So, when it got to where I was close enough to retirement [from the Canadian Museum of Nature] to get a decent pension, and a nice consulting opportunity opened up, and also the sessional teaching opportunity at Queen's came up at the same time, so I thought, oh this is a good time to just cut the umbilical cord and just go off to teach and consult.

AM: Did you attend any early meetings and conferences? Which sessions or speakers do you remember as particularly valuable?

RW: An outstanding one for me was an IIC-CG workshop at UBC that Miriam Clavir put on in the early 80s. She was at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, and she was instrumental in getting our field to pay attention to Indigenous rights and their needs for caring for and using collection items. In this workshop, Miriam got UBC Department of Adult Education specialists to put on a two day workshop demonstrating many different ways that you can reach adult learners. That changed my life. It woke me up to [paying] attention to what people are receiving, not [just] what I’m saying. It’s still a struggle. We just naturally think about what we’re saying,
not what people are receiving. [Another] great talk would have been one that Miriam Clavir gave at a CG meeting where she just got the whole audience participating in a decision about whether a blanket in the collection could be released for an Indigenous group for one of their ceremonies. It was just brilliant to engage people, not just to show PowerPoints talking about it.

There was one that Jonathan Ashley Smith gave at IIC in 1994, it was called “Let’s Be Honest.” He was just talking about all the environmental control baloney that goes on. One of his things was that, when you send something on loan, people put their hydrothermograph in a box so they get a nice flat line. And, it’s kind of like, “well, admit it, it’s true!” (Laughing). So that was an important presentation to me.
[…] You’ve gotta have fun so that your mind’s wide open to thinking in other totally different ways. But I’d learned a lot of that way back in Miriam Clavir’s workshop.

AM: Over the course of your career thus far are their certain treatments or
accomplishments in which you take particular pride? Do you have an especially important moment regarding a treatment or discovery?

RW: Well, the way of using [sodium] dithionite, citrate, and bicarbonate to gently dissolve rust away from mineral specimens just came at a fantastic time when the ROM had discovered many beautiful, slightly soluble phosphate minerals that were rust-coated and could not be cleaned with any traditional method. And, when we could explain how to do that, it really rocked the mineral collector and curator world. That was kind of my step up in credibility, because it did create a lot of value, saved a lot of valuable collection items… it’s actually called the Waller method in the mineral curation field.

AM: Do you take apprentices? What students have you trained or worked with?

RW: Yeah, I like working with all kinds of folks. Now it’s not so easy to take an apprentice, although we’re open to it, but it’s hard because I just work out of a home office and it’s hard to take interns [when my work involves travel]. I also, I don’t like unpaid internships. So, I have [worked with interns] a little bit. Some Queen’s folks, or Fleming folks, I’m indifferent — a lot of my very best people are Fleming people, in some ways, actually, their education is better for what we do —

AM: It’s broader…

RW: Yes… Anyway, so it’s hard, because it’s helpful if the [intern] gets to meet the clients and see the situation on the ground, but that’s expensive when it’s around the world. Sometimes people are happy to [pay for travel in voluntary internships] just for the experience. But I don’t like it. I feel we should pay interns, but that kind of limits opportunities. Have you thought about that kind of thing?

AM: Yeah. It was really difficult to find an internship, because a lot of places would only do paid internships, but they didn’t have any money. So then there were no internships [laughing].

RW: No, exactly. And that’s the problem that I have, and it’s partly that it’s hard to find the money to make it a meaningful internship. And yet if you dangle things out there as unpaid, or you pay your own travel costs, that doesn’t seem quite fair either. How do we come to terms with that?

AM: I don’t know…

RW: I don’t know either.

AM: What would you consider to be the ideal characteristics of a student or a trainee you would welcome into your department? What do you feel is the ideal method of training?

RW: Positivity is absolutely the top thing, and absolutely the bottom thing is negativity. And going along with those are teamwork, supportive[ness], a nice combination of humility and gravitas… which is kind of tough, but they need to occur in combination, or either one is useless by itself.

AM: Throughout your career have you worked for museums and/or private collectors? Has the type of work you have done changed over the years?

RW: Initially I worked within a museum. Very rarely [I] would do some work for private collectors. But then [I] have done a lot of teaching and consulting work for other organizations. That’s mostly what we do now.

AM: Would you describe for me a particularly satisfying moment in your career?

RW: Well, when I got into CAPC, I think that was truly a highlight. When I finished my PhD when I was 50 years old, that was also a highlight. I mean, I absolutely believe in never-ending learning, just constantly, which is why I can’t retire just yet, cause my work is just continuously learning all the time. It’s either learning on my own, or with a co-author, writing something, or with a client. We’re all learning together.

AM: How much do you feel the conservator is obligated to educate the public about the profession of conservation?

RW: It’s kind of funny, I think it’s incredibly important and it’s not something that I'm good at, at all. It’s not my niche. I don’t think it’s the best place for me to put my time and effort, because there are so many other people much better at it than me, but I absolutely support those initiatives and resources going toward that. I was once in a workshop where there was a [woman who] spoke about her conservation
initiatives just at the family and community level; getting people to appreciate what they have that they want to hold onto — mostly family pictures — and how they can take care of them a little bit better. Like not putting them in a window, just that kind of thing. And I think that’s beautiful, and important, and would benefit us all to have that grassroots sense of avoiding foolish damage to our heritage. I’m a huge believer in it. It’s just not for me, directly, though I’m happy to talk to mineral clubs about [preserving] their things, I enjoy that and they get a kick out of it, so I guess in that way I do [educate the public]. And I talk to my grandson’s class about what I do, so I guess I maybe do a little bit more of that public outreach than I think but less than many of my colleagues do.

AM: This is my own question for you — You specialize in natural history collections. Are there connections between heritage conservation and environmental conservation that conservators should keep in mind? What should conservators consider when thinking about sustainability in our field?

RW: Absolutely, there’s lots of connections. I think the number one, to my mind, is: don’t be wasteful. I think I get a bit of that because my parents went through the Depression, so we get this reinforced signal about: you eat what’s on your plate, you don’t waste anything, because you never know when you won’t have enough. So that sense of don’t be wasteful sunk in to me. We just have a moral duty to society to not be wasteful and that involves not doing things that aren’t going to have benefit, whether that’s climate control, or just over-packing for shipment, all of
those things. In risk analysis, a lot of it is about identifying not just what we feel are significant risks, but which are demonstratively are not significant. I think if we, as a field, were as parsimonious as my grandparents were about not wasting things, we wouldn’t have so [many] problems [laughing].

AM: Do you have anything else you would like to share about your experience in
conservation or with the CAPC?

RW: I should probably be careful about what I say, but… In any group of people, if you take a random grab sample of people, there’s some kind, generous, nice people, and there’s a few real assholes. But, if we look at the conservation profession, as a grab sample, I think they’re better than any random grab sample, because they care about something other than themselves, and that’s nice. If we need to exist in a grab sample, as we all do, I’d rather be in a better grab sample
than a worse one. And then, I think people who commit to CAPC are maybe even a slightly better grab sample than the overall conservation one, because they care about ensuring the public is well served by conservation professionals. That’s not too rude is it?

AM: No, I don’t think so.