It looks as though we have had a month off ... let's call it a holiday or a break when it has actually been because September has done its usual trick of disappearing in a flash. However, we are back and here are two reasons why we love curators: museum ones, that is.
It is difficult to know where curators come in the hierarchy of reincarnation. Are they auditors or accountants who have lived blameless lives or somewhere below risk assessors? While individually charming and knowledgeable, they can occasionally show a devotion to paperwork and process which makes the USA Immigration Service look relaxed and imaginative.
Consider the example of a local museum building which used to be a bank. Like most such buildings, it has a strongroom with a wonderful thick door, dials and handles. Does the museum store its priceless Ming vase in the vault? its original Leonardo? its unique 14th century hand-crafted book? No. After much trouble de-activating the alarms, skipping past the infra-red beams and cracking the combination, the ambitious and inventive burglar will find ... the curator's paperwork. Nuff said?
Paperwork is evidence of title and so they can perhaps be forgiven but, more worryingly for scholarship, they can be equally jealous of knowledge and interpretation.
We had identified a large collection of historic images in a large remote museum and offered to help digitise and catalogue them. There were real reasons for wanting do the work soon: the material was fairly unstable and would therefore be at risk of decay, and the pictures were of things local to us and of a period for which there were local people who might be able to help identify the scenes.
Back came the answer: they were not a priority for funding - well all the more reason to allow us to help - and there was not sufficient curator time to analyse the images.
We did not actually want a curator; we were offering to do the work ourselves, with volunteers. How a curator, sitting in a remote office, could possibly identify the images was not explained. People on the ground might have done so, from memory or from other publications but that would not be of an acceptable standard. Could we have a look at the images and come up with some suggestions for the curator? No, not acceptable. We even offered to assemble a partnership bid to a funding body to do the digitisation work.
So the images will no doubt sit there, to give the museum their due, probably stable in the expensive cared-for environment, while the people who might have been able to say what the images showed quietly leave this earth.
What will the curator of the future say when faced with the images: 'if only ...' perhaps?
