Musings on Museum Work

I went into the May Weber Collection internship with very few expectations. My previous working knowledge of how museum collections are handled was nonexistent, but I knew that museum work was something I valued. I chose to participate in the internship largely because I had attended an archaeology field school the year before and was interested in what happens to many of those artifacts after the dirt has been cleaned off of them. Having analyzed the ceramic assemblage of the excavation site, I anticipated the museum work would be similar: sitting with a tray of objects for hours at a time, researching their history and building a better timeframe for the entire assemblage—or collection in this case.

Needless to say, I was wrong. I certainly underestimated the amount of physical work involved in museum collections management. Aside from cozying up with a single object to catalogue it, I rarely spent more than ten minutes in a single place. Working with a collection demands constant movement as well as the hands-on “dirty work” of addressing a collection. For the May Weber Collection, much of this “dirty work” came from carefully navigating the mold lurking in the crevices of many of the objects. In the beginning, I was hesitant to wear gloves when working with the objects largely because May Weber promoted the viewing and handling of her collection. Encountering so much mold had me singing a different tune, and I happily wore gloves for the rest of the cataloguing process.

Mold aside, the collection was challenging in a variety of ways. One maddening reality of the collection was that we had limited documentation on many of the objects and thus had to rely on attribution. The collection had previously been catalogued, but many of the attributions, especially regarding provenance, were unsettlingly misjudged. It was our job to catch these mistakes as we were re-cataloguing the objects for our new database. Such objects were often cast aside for further research, which caused the entire management process to seem rather disorganized. In general, working with the collection forced us to operate in a rather non-linear fashion and be able to multitask in new ways. I have never been very talented at multitasking, so it was certainly a challenge to have to address multiple objects or have several ongoing projects at one time.

Learning to tackle multiple facets at once was one of the most rewarding experiences of the internship. I also acquired a highly critical eye when analyzing an object and learned to recognize and differentiate between materials and designs. The materials became especially crucial to know when building the permanent mounts for storage. For example, when making a tray for an object that has animal materials (e.g. feathers, leather, silk), you must use unbuffered paper instead of buffered paper. Materials also guided much of the research we completed to understand the origins of the objects.

Researching the objects was another challenging, yet rewarding process. On one hand, successful research yielded a plethora of useful information regarding an object’s provenance, use, and significance. It also offered a unique sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, less successful research offered a unique sensation of frustration and halted even the most productive days. Much of my individual frustration came from inaccessibility to objects in museums; if the museum did not have a public database, it was only possible to explore similar objects through direct interaction with a person working at a museum. I have always enjoyed research, so it was a rewarding challenge to build a detailed object narrative while increasing my research abilities. Now I am more confident that I can navigate the black hole of information available online much more effectively, and my taste for research continues to increase (along with the amount of useful results)!

I would posit that the average person has no idea how much work goes behind a single museum collection or how physically and mentally demanding that work is. Similarly, that average person may not appreciate how important that work is in the preservation not just of objects but of historical and contemporary knowledge. There is an obvious pressure on museums to properly care for and exhibit their collections, but there is a less-than-obvious labor force in charge of making that happen. Because the bulk of a museum’s collections will be in storage at all times, collections work will often go unnoticed or unappreciated by the patrons of museums. While appreciation of this work is not the expectation or goal, it is certainly an important part in the successful interpretation and handling of material culture. It is within this material culture that museums and similar educational institutions gain their foundation and impact in the public integration of knowledge.