#conservationrestoration

When you're a conservation student, you're taught that every object requires intense background research before any actions are taken. You can spend several weeks finding out interesting details about an object that will inform your intervention. When you start a museum job in what we call "bench conservation" (meaning you sit down - presumably on a bench - and work on the objects), you might get given 20 things and told they need to be done by yesterday, so extra care will need to be taken and maybe extra off-work hours too! So, if you're a student, enjoy your research time! Chances are you'll never have as much of it again after you graduate. ___ Follow for more conservation and museum-related memes.

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Browsing for museum jobs is hard. This stuff is all I get. If you are also looking for museum jobs, make sure you sign up for the job boards of your local professional organisations! They will be much more useful than Linkedin in our field. Since I'm in Ontario, I recommend CAC-ACCR @cac_accr , OMA (Ontario Museum Association) @museumsontario , and CMA (Canadian Museums Association) @musecdn . If you're in the west coast, check out the BCMA (British Columbia Museum Association) @bc_museums_association. Don't forget to look for help and network with the various emerging professional networks and other related organisations such as @workinculture.ca. . . . ___ Follow for more GLAM memes and related bite-sized resources!

Raise your hand if you have held back a laugh when the newbie asks you what the (conservation) department budget is! If you don't work in GLAM, this is what it's like. 😖 Galleries - Libraries - Archives - Museums _______ Follow for more conservation and museum-related memes. ❤️ . . . .

There's this super glam expectation about GLAM. Visitors think we all work in teams of 10 in fabulous labs in super white labcoats with fancy vapour extraction trunks hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by a million beakers, LED lamps with magnifying glasses on them, cedar easels and $10,000 microscopes. Some of us do. But most of the time, it's just a single person with a bookcase, a long table, 5 beakers, a standing fan, and a couple very sharp scalpel blades. _______ Follow for more conservation memes. ❤️ . . . .

I can't speak for museums everywhere, but in my personal experience, this is the case. Only a minority of things in storage will look as good as the stuff you have on display - especially in smaller museums. Most of the stuff stored is not really up to "museum standards" in terms of how good it looks, so when exhibitions are being planned conservators are often consulted regarding how long it will take to treat certain objects curators would like to display. _______ Follow for more conservation memes. ❤️ . . . .

If you're a potential student of museum-related fields, you might have gathered by now that it's a tough one. Questionable remuneration, fast-disappearing budgets, social invisibility, a limited number of permanent jobs, and ironically high barriers to entry are some of the main complaints. So if you know all this and you still want to do this because you love the field, then you deserve a star and a digital certificate (because there's no budget to print you a physical one and also #sustainability). We recognise your efforts and applaud your determination! 👏👏👏 And recommend you also get business and marketing skills because private practice may become necessary. . . . _______ Follow for more conservation memes. ❤️ . . . .

TMS is short for The Museum System. It is one of many different types of collections management database systems that collections around the world use to figure out a number of things such as - object name - provenance - exhibition inclusion - donor information - materials and conservation treatments - current location, etc., etc., etc. Now, when you are managing a collection that may well be over a million objects, 150 years old in the making, moved to three different buildings over the course of the museum's history, managed by 5 different generations of rotating staff and across Windows and Mac... you get an idea of how hard it can be to just find a thing. Raise your hand if you actually thought museums know where everything is all the time. 🖐🤣 _______ Follow for more conservation memes. ❤️ . . . .