Reader, have you ever met a museum curator? Have you ever penetrated to the dark rooms where they lurk? Do you know what they do for the money that you, the taxpayer, spends on them? I think it was when I was made redundant in 2011 that I realised how few people know what a museum curator does. When most people visit a museum, they encounter the ‘front of house’ staff. These are the people who are responsible for taking their money, showing them where the toilets are, telling them how to get to a particular exhibit, vacuuming the carpets, and so on. Some of them are very knowledgeable and can answer many of the visitors’ questions. Visitors, and indeed district councillors, won’t meet the “back of house” staff, i.e. the curators unless they come to an open day or evening lecture. 

So, what was a typical day as a curator like, when I was doing it? I have worked in three museums and volunteered in a fourth, as well as swapping anecdotes with curators from many others. The following is not an actual day, it’s a composite made of the sort of tasks that museum curators have to do in the average local authority museum. It also refers to a generic local authority museum, not any one in particular. So here goes…

…Having spent half an hour in a traffic jam, I sit down at my desk and log onto my computer. While it warms up, I wash up a coffee cup from the festering heap in the sink in the curator’s office and make myself a cup of coffee. I then attack my emails. I delete several dozen which have come from the council offices to all staff, but have nothing to do with the museum. I forward two advertisements for Viagra to the council’s  IT department with a rude note complaining that their firewall needs attention as a respectable middle-aged female staff member shouldn’t have to field inappropriate stuff like this. This is not really because I am shocked, but to get my own back for all the perfectly respectable websites that I need to consult for my work, but which they have blocked in their “one size fits all” campaign against staff wasting time, thus seriously holding up my research.

I then deal with simple enquiries, like, “will you give the Lacemakers a lecture on the 27^th March after their AGM,” (yes; I like the Lacemakers and they gave us a lovely demo for free at one of our open days and anyway I like sounding off for 45 minutes about my favourite topics); or “will you tell me which sites in the Roman town were the most important during the 1^st century AD and why”, (no; I’m not writing your undergraduate thesis for you).

I then proceed to the difficult ones. Like, “approximately how many Palaeolithic handaxes found in the XXXshire area do you have in the museum?”. How on earth do you admit to a researcher from the university of Cambridge that your accessions register has never been fully digitised, because you haven’t got the staff to do it,  and you therefore have no way of finding out, except by going through the paper records page by page, which you certainly don’t have the staff to do?

Somebody wants to come and look at all the Roman tiles from three sites in the town centre. Your eyes brighten, because you know that you only have to go to the store, where the boxes are stacked in alphabetical order of sites, and get them. So you get into your car, carefully noting your mileage for the claim form, and drive through another traffic jam to the out of town store, a disused warehouse.  Sites A and B are fine, you load them into the back of your car (did I mention that the council does NOT pay for the Business/Light Goods insurance necessary?) and go back for the tiles from Site C. They are not there. There is no Movement Ticket in the space on the shelf to tell you who has taken them and where to, let alone why. Fortunately it has to be someone inside the museum, because only museum staff are allowed keys to the store. You spend nearly half an hour searching the store just in case some idiot has moved them to a different shelf for some reason, and you still can’t find them.

Back to the museum, where you explode to the other four curators who share the office with you. One of them suggests that a certain senior person was giving a lecture on Roman tiles the day before yesterday. This person is out, but in their office are the missing boxes. You remove them, secure in the knowledge that they won’t give them another thought. Why do people always think they are entitled to disregard the rules they probably made themselves? If they needed six boxes of artefacts for a piece of research themself and couldn’t find out where they had gone, they wouldn’t be very pleased, would they? 

After a sandwich and a cup of horrible coffee at your desk, followed by a brisk walk, the afternoon is spent looking at the contents of the plastic bags which are cluttering up your desk. Some of them are enquiries from members of the public who have dug them up in their back gardens, or picked them up when they were having a country walk. They can be anything from a genuine Neolithic leaf-shaped arrowhead to a piece of Georgian chamber pot. These are a delight. Tact and diplomacy are sometimes required, however, when telling members of the public that their fascinating piece of flint which fits the hand so well is actually a perfectly natural frost-shattered pebble.  Other plastic bags hold collections of broken potsherds dug up by the museum’s field archaeologist. They are singularly unexciting as they are all smashed into very small pieces. The field archaeologist wants to know how old they are so he can date the layer they came from, in the (all too frequent) absence of coins or preserved timbers for dendrochronology. If I’m not sure of the date I just pass them round the room and the conclave of curators pronounce on them. A short report is typed up.

Towards the end of the day some time is spent Googling the names of various fossils, because the fossils in our natural history collection were catalogued a long time ago, and the nomenclature has changed. It is therefore a little difficult to match the notes just given to us by a visiting expert with the records in the catalogue. If the museum still had a natural history curator, the thing would be easy, but the post was abolished long ago, so an archaeologist or a social historian has to do it.

On and off all day you try to get hold of the local police firearms officer. The museum needs a firearms certificate, because it hold a number of antiquated but technically usable guns that have to be kept securely, and the officer needs to visit to approve the security arrangements. He is difficult to get hold of. Try again tomorrow, before the emails.

Time to go home. And as you wander through the empty galleries to the exit you think “How lucky I am to work here!” And you really really mean it.