#museum professionals

What are the most frequently asked questions in your museum?

Admission to graduate conservation training programs is very competitive. Often, schools will want applicants to have several hours of experience in both intuitional and private conservation studios. Here at the Brooklyn Museum, we have a long history of accepting pre-program interns. Some go on to become conservators, while others come to realize a related museum profession is more suited to their interests. Whatever the future holds for our interns, we hope that the experience of interning in our lab will foster a deeper appreciation for artwork they encounter throughout their lives. 

While in the lab, pre-program interns assist with the less glamorous responsibilities of conservators, such as integrated pest management, in addition to hands-on treatment. Here, two of our pre-program interns, Aashna Kapoor and Natasha Kung, are assisting in the consolidation and cleaning of a section of a ceiling from the Narinjistan Mansion, which will eventually be displayed in our renovated Middle East art gallery.

And there was a point made:

If you think of culture, cultural products and institutions from the 1970s onwards for example and compare to today, how have things changed? Music - radio, albums, cassettes, CDs, MTV... And now you can have a playlist that mixes and matches from everything ever (or even have an algorithm make the playlist for you). Books have jumped to ebooks, movies and tv are on-demand.

But museum content is still exhibitions. We don't yet work in that "people can curate their own experience" -kind of way. Maybe a little bit on services like Finna.fi or Europeana, but not at large scales and not well.

And we were also thinking about what is the actual content - what is the music - that museums have? Is it museum objects? Because at least us museum professionals keep going on about the context and the stories attached to the museum objects. Like I will not take an old photograph into the collection if I have no idea who or what or when is being depicted in it. Oldness doth not a museum object make. So I'd argue that the informational content is the actual content that museums have, and the objects are the vessels that carry the message, much like vinyl is the material that used to carry the music.

So what if museums could come up with a system (I hate to use Spotify as an example because that company participates in the genocide of Palestinians, but I am thinking of a thing like Spotify for museum stuff) where we put our "music" to be available for anyone anywhere, and then people themselves or an algorithm or AI or whatever could compile "playlists" of those things tailored to specific interests. So like all the content tagged as "archaeology" and "iron age" could be grouped together from across different museums and whoever wants the Iron Age Archaeology -playlist could access that. Etc.

"AAMD has completed its 2023 Salary Survey, which includes responses from 195 museums in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and covers more than 50 different staff positions, from the director’s office to leadership and support positions in curatorial, education, advancement, communications, and security departments.