| Curators oversee collections in museums, zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, nature centres, and historic sites. They acquire items through purchases, gifts, field exploration, inter-museum exchanges, or, in the case of some plants and animals, reproduction. Curators also plan and prepare exhibits. In natural history museums, curators collect and observe specimens in their natural habitat. Their work involves describing and classifying species, while specially trained collection managers and technicians provide hands-on care of natural history collections. Most curators use computer databases to catalogue and organise their collections. Many also use the Internet to make information available to other curators and the public. Increasingly, curators are expected to participate in grant application and fund-raising to support their projects.
Most curators specialise in a field, such as botany, art, palaeontology, or history. Those working in large institutions may be highly specialised. A large natural history museum, for example, would employ specialists in birds, fishes, insects, and molluscs. Some curators maintain the collection, others do research, and others perform administrative tasks. Registrars, for example, keep track of and move objects in the collection. In small institutions, with only one or a few curators, one curator may be responsible for multiple tasks, from maintaining collections to directing the affairs of museums.
Nature of the work
Archivists, curators, and museum technicians search for, acquire, appraise, analyse, describe, arrange, catalogue, restore, preserve, exhibit, maintain, and store valuable items that can be used by researchers or for exhibitions, publications, broadcasting, and other educational programs. Depending on the occupation, these items include historical documents, audio-visual materials, institutional records, works of art, coins, stamps, minerals, clothing, maps, living and preserved plants and animals, buildings, computer records, or historic sites.
Archivists and curators plan and oversee the arrangement, cataloguing, and exhibition of collections and, along with technicians and conservators, maintain collections. Archivists and curators may co-ordinate educational and public outreach programs, such as tours, workshops, lectures, and classes, and may work with the boards of institutions to administer plans and policies. They also may research topics or items relevant to their collections. Although some duties of archivists and curators are similar, the types of items they deal with differ. Curators usually handle objects found in cultural, biological, or historical collections, such as sculptures, textiles, and paintings, while archivists mainly handle valuable records, documents, or objects that are retained because they originally accompanied and relate specifically to the document. |