As you consider museum curator as a profession there are many things you should know. This web page was designed to help you decide whether curating is the right occupation for you. In this web page, if time allows, you will hopefully find an interview with the curator of birds at Carnegie Institute, a few web links where you can find more information or possibly a job, as well as many other interesting things I haven't thought of as of yet. Well I hope you enjoy all that this page has to offer.
Before I continue my web page, I feel that I should explain how this web page came to be. You must be asking yourself why a sophomore in high school would spend his time creating a web page dedicated to the field of museum curator? I must say in all honesty that while I believe curating is a facinating career, I am not especially enthusiastic about becoming one. This web page is the final product of a school project assigned a few weeks ago (due tomorrow of course). The assignment was to make a web page about a particular field related to the sciences. You know the rest. I got "museum curator", researched, conducted an interview, found out that being a museum curator is more interesting than I thought, and, although I still don't anticipate going into the field myself, I developed a new respect for those who have done so.
Here is some of what I've learned.....
Museum curators care for, manage, and develop collections and conduct field research. They may be called on to travel for field study. The curator may, depending on the size of the museum, supervise multiple museum activities or just those in a particular field. Specialties range from art, history, and social history to science and technolgoy. There are many other fields as well. A curator must have an appreciation of and in-depth knowledge of his or her particular field, patience, attention to detail, a methodical approach to work, and good communication skills. He or she will probably work inside but may be required to travel a great deal, sometimes under difficult circumstances, in order to do field studies. Depending on the size of the museum, the curator may have significant managerial and administrative duties.
Well, officially I am curator of birds, but a few years ago for various internal political reasons I received the somewhat unorthodox title of Senior Curator of Birds. The reason for that was that for awhile I was Curator of Life Sciences, but the position was abolished, and people thought I had been demoted, but it was just that my job title and position changed and I was given the title of Senior Curator of Birds to indicate that I hadn't been demoted, but officially it is just Curator of Birds.
That varies tremendously as to which institution and what kind of research is going on. The section of birds at Carnegie Natural History isn't equipped to do any of the kind of molecular studies present in many, many other institutions, but there are other museums where someone with the title and specialty of curator of birds will be working largely with the various aspects of molecular and genetic studies. We're just not able to do these studies here so we are relying more on the traditional studies of birds using more traditional methods.
(chuckling) There is no such thing as an average day. I can tell you about myself, but I shouldn't try to generalize because I am sort of the last remnant of an older generation in that I got my PhD about 43 years ago, so a lot of the things I do are sort of the remnants of an earlier age. I am not able to participate in some of the more modern techniques. On the other hand, I know the literature very well so, besides doing various kinds of taxidermic studies and distributional studies on my own on the birds of South America, I am in great demand for tasks such as reviewing books for publishing, as well as various jobs involving bird art. In other words, I have a very miscellaneous schedule. Today curators tend to be much, much more specialized.
Well, it's hard to say. When I've been behind a word processor for a long time writing critiques and that sort of thing, I get a kick out of just going back into the collection and doing something that necessitates hands-on sorts of things. In other museums, things like cataloging specimens are given to lower-ranking people or even volunteers, which shouldn't be. I like adding to the collection in the sense of getting to the backlog of specimens and putting them away, and so on, and then getting back to all the research and writing.
Now, it is necessary to have a PhD. Once upon a time that was not true, and the title "Curator" was a little more loosely applied than it is now. From a dictionary standpoint, the word has involved the feel of curation, sort of a housekeeping thing, but now that is changed so that most museums, especially the larger ones, consider housekeeping the handling of the collections themselves, and responding to requests for loans and things like that. Now the curator is expected to spend more than 50% of his time in original research and you are not even eligible to apply for a curatorial position until you have a PhD.
In a single department, or section as we call it here, there may be one or more curators in each section. The word "curator" does not imply that that person is the leader of the section. In fact, some sections are led by someone who has not reached the rank of curator because the previous curator has retired and the next person in line has not met all the requirements to be a curator. It varies very much on personality. In some sections, the curator is sort of dictatorial, and whatever he says goes, and in other sections relationships are a little more collegial. As far as interaction with people outside the field, it is sort of on a personal basis on the part of the curators.
Probably about $30,000 if it's a big museum, and $25,000 for a smaller one.
It depends on the financial situation of the museum. With each level you go up, there is a floor and ceiling salary. When you jump to a different level there is a fairly substantial raise, on average I would guess the highest salary would be about $60,000 - $70,000 a year.
It depends on what you do. If you are out in the field collecting specimens, you need to be able to prepare and preserve. Beyond that, you have to have a pretty good background in math and statistics because, the way it is now, many of the results have to be analyzed using those skills. You need to be able to find things in libraries, and it's useful to know more than one language, because a lot of the old literature is written in French, Spanish or German. You also need some practise in public speaking.
I think I was pretty prepared because it was always what I wanted to do. There were problems, of course, but not the sort of things you can anticipate. Financing has been a problem the last couple of years. We haven't always had enough to get what we want, and another one of the bad things is that the amount of paperwork has increased greatly. It used to be, if I wanted to go on a trip somewhere, all I had to do was stick my head in my boss' office and say, "I'm going on a trip. See you next Thursday," and he would allow it. Now I have to go through a lot of paperwork to get authorization to go on a trip.
My education would be very different, because half of science has been invented since I've been in college. There would be a lot more mathematics and biochemistry. There are a lot of things I would have to catch up in since they have changed so much since then.
I would ask the person what kind of research he would like to do. A generation ago you could be kind of a generalist, but now you have to be much more specialized. In each field of science, there are different universities with professors who can prepare the students very well to be a curator, so by the time a student is in graduate school, one has to have a very good idea of what research one would like to do.