In this thread Antigen said I ought to start a thread about my job. (I did one a few years back, but thought I’d start this one rather than resurrect the zombie.) So, if any new members have questions, ask away.
What I do:
– Clean artifacts of all shapes, sizes and ages and get them prepared for storage.
– Do research and the accessioning paperwork.
– Help design and install new exhibits.
– Lead tours of the musuem facilites.
– Clean the facility itself.
It’s a smaller museum, which is why my job duties are so varied. It’s an awesome job and I have a lot of fun with it. (Can’t* believe* they pay me to do this!)
I’m also willing to give some advice on how to clean and care for your antiques. Note, however, that I am *not *an expert and I can only give general tips. Nor can I give any advice as to restoration and the like, because we don’t deal with that sort of thing. (If your item is something super-special, you should take it in for a professional to examine.)
Is your museum specialized? I seem to remember a post about pioneer cabins…
Who decides if an artifact is worthy of keeping? What happens if someone leaves stuff to the museum and it isn’t worth keeping or isn’t what you display? What happens to it?
Donations. My museum has been collecting artifacts since the 1930s. People call us and tell us what they have and ask us if we want it, or just show up at the door with an item in hand. We also sometimes come in to work and find stuff sitting on the doorstep like an abandoned baby.
My curator has always joked that he’s going to change our slogan to: We’re Half of the Distance to the City Dump. That’s because we’re sort of the receptacle for all of the “junk” that came out of grandma’s attic.
It’s amazing what people want to get rid of. Some of this stuff is actually really valuable both monetarily and historically. A lot of people just don’t want to be “bothered” with it, and so they dump it on us. Not that we’re complaining.
It’s a “general history” museum. We collect all sorts of things. (We have an awesome collection of Japanese art, for example, and a priceless collection of early books and manuscripts.) We try to restrict our collection to things which have a local connection. That’s actually sort of a space issue. If we accepted everything offered to us, we’d be stuffed to the rafters.
We do have a “pioneer cabin” that was donated to us and has been reassembled on the property.
That’s decided by the curator and above him, the Collections Committee. If an item is not something we want to add to our collection, we give it back to the donor. If they don’t want it back, we offer it to another museum which specializes in that sort of item.
On very rare occasions, artifacts are sold, but that is something that’s very unusual and has to be approved of by a comittee. It’s usually because we couldn’t care for the item properly or because it was too large to fit in our storage areas. (That happened with a giant painting we had. It wouldn’t fit in our refrigerated storage area and its condition was deteriorating. It was decided that the best thing we could do would be to sell it and use the funds to upgrade our storage facility.)
We display only a tiny fraction of what’s actually in our collection. We have a rotating exhibit in which we take “treasures from the attic” out occasionally and display them for a while so that people will have a chance to see them.
I started back in 2001 as a volunteer. I didn’t have any education or specialized training in the museum field.
They put me down in the basement cleaning and cataloging a room full of rusty old farm tools. My dilligence and dedication impressed them, so a little less than a year later, they hired me on as staff.
The museum field is one of the few left in which “equivellent experience” actually still means something. Going to college to get a degree and then trying to enter the field is actually harder than doing it the way I did it.
The first thing you’ve got to know about going into this sort of work is that you’re not going to make a lot of money. The “big time” museums like the Smithsonian may pay a lot, but it’s really hard to get hired on there, especially for someone who has just graduated.
I saw this through the experience of the intern we had last year. She was finishing her master’s degree in museum studies and she was having a hell of a hard time finding a job. After she got her bachelors, she went out job-hunting but she didn’t have any practical experience, so no one would hire her. So, she went back to get her masters, hoping that this would give her an edge, but she was running into the same wall. She had a big student debt to pay and the only jobs she could get without experience were the entry-level positions which didn’t pay squat.
So this sort od thing isn’t a big problem, then? Most of the stuff you get is actually something you’d want and not some trash you have to get rid of? What would you say is the rough keep vs trash ratio?
What is your museum’s ratio of items displayed vs items in storage?
That I can’t say. Different museums have different numbering systems. It could be a “C” over a “57” which might mean “cataloged in '57”.
At my museum, there have been three different systems in the past, each implimented by a director when they took charge. Some of them are a complete mystery to us and we’ll probably never figure out what they meant.
We keep about 90% of the stuff that’s offered to us. The main reason for rejection is if we have an identical item in our collection already or of the item has no historical or local significance.
As to what is on display versus what is in storage, I would estimate that about 1% of our collection is on display at any given time. We have four buildings in our complex, each with dozens of massive storage areas that are stuffed full. Some of them we have yet to fully explore.
As an example, we have one house in our complex which has a cavernous attic. Whenever we’re getting ready to do a new exhibit, we go up there and search around to see if we can find things of the appropriate time period to use. It’s a treasure hunt because nobody knows all of what’s up there. If we find an item, we look to see if it’s been numbered or if we can find anything in the records which might indicate where it came from. If we find an item which shouldn’t be stored in that enviornment while we’re doing the search, we bring it out with the rest of our discovered “treasures.”
In the past, record-keeping was spotty at best. The place was, for the most part, run by volunteers who-- while well intentioned-- had no idea what they were doing. They came up with record-keeping systems and numbering systems but never bothered to make up a “key” which would explain what their numbers meant. Nor did they describe things well. The ledgers might say something like, “Donated: one old doll.” Then, they would put it into a box and store it wherever they could find room.
When my curator took over the place in 1990, he spent the first ten years just trying to get things into some semblance of order. If you asked him how much progress he’s made in the last 16 years, he’d tell you that he now thinks he’s got a “good start” on it. None of us expect that we’ll get everything sorted out within our lifetimes.
When you “reject” a donated article, do you mean you just give it back to the person who brought it? If it’s valuable enough, but something you already have, do you try to find another museum that might want it?
Have you ever damaged or broken something while working on it?
What’s the strangest article in the museum, in your opinion?
If you could choose a theme for a big new exhibit, what would you want to do?
What advice would you have for someone hoping to get into museum work?
Yes and yes. If they’re giving us a bunch of stuff at once and it will take us a while to make a decision, we have them fill out a “temporary receipt form” which has their name and address so we can contact them to come and pick up anything we don’t want.
If the donor doesn’t want the item back, we have contacts with museums all over the country. Pretty much, there’s a museum for everything these days. I’ve never come across a situation where we couldn’t find a “home” for something.
I have, to my eternal shame. Luckily, it was repairable. I’m a very clumsy person, so I have to be ultra-careful. (I’ve learned that I can fall down a flight of stairs without damaging the item I’m holding.)
Oh, man. That’s a tough one. There are so many to choose from. I found an opium pipe in the attic once, and we have a douche from the early 1900s. We have three skulls which are all purportedly of the same man-- a murderer who was hanged in the 1860s. We have a “grave bomb” which was designed to keep people from stealing corpses and embalming equipment from a long-defunct funeral home.
I want to do a display on Victorian mourning customs. We have a large collection of mortuary photographs, hair jewelery and other assorted pieces of morbidity. My curator won’t do it, though. He insists people would be squicked by the dead baby pictures.
Find a museum and volunteer. Smaller ones are better because they need their staff members to do all of the jobs and you’ll get to learn all of the different types of work. If you want to move up in the ranks, by all means, get a degree, but experience is the most important asset you can have.
All visitors to my museum are escorted by a staff member. We don’t have everything in cases yet. (Cases are expensive.) It’d be hard for a visitor to find the necessary privacy for fooling around.
