Scott Shipley Fall 2024 Museum Training Internship ePortfolio

Scott Shipley Fall 2024 Museum Training Internship ePortfolio

2024

Museums -- Curatorship.

The following describes an internship at the Casper College Library and the Western History Center. The internship focused on advancing the GLAM exhibit by planning and preparing for the Chaos, Patterns, and Order exhibit, with a focus on the role of Curator in the museum.

At the beginning of the internship, we started by looking at the continuation of the GLAM exhibit, with an emphasis on Bryon H. Clapp's WWII Letters Home and his “Recollections of the War.” including the Jean Gallatin Ogolbee photo album and the newspaper clippings of Elizabeth “Neal” Forsling. These records were cataloged, they included an accurate description, including the name of the collection and the item's type, e.g., photograph, letter, or newspaper, and a catalog accession number. We looked at selecting the appropriate items, placing them in the exhibit, and adding and subtracting where appropriate.

We had several conversations about ownership, how it pertains to collections, and exhibitiions, and the time frame allowed by copyright laws, and family wishes. Ownership in the context of a collection is of paramount concern. The ability to exhibit a collection should never be an issue if the Curator and Archivist have done their due diligence before and during the accession process. However, as I have seen in the three museums where I have interned, there seems to be some grey area. Does the museum have full ownership and the supporting paperwork? Is there a stipulation regarding limiting what might be exhibited within that time frame? And many more questions.

The role of the curator has been of significant focus this semester. While researching the role of the curator I became aware of the importance that role is to the life of the collection and the individual item. The Curator tracks the life of the collection. With the increasing number of exhibits planned by Casper College Museum Studies interns through the Library’s Western History Center, this archives and special collections unit has been researching ongoing conversations on how the two often quite different organizations are adopting principles and practices from one another to increase engagement with and use of materials while also building relationships. As part of an ongoing process that started in the spring of 2024, we have been exploring how the definition of what it means to be a curator and an understanding of how the responsibilities of a curator operating in multiple settings can be used to create a role delineation statement to expand the scope of the critical work of interns. To manage this, one of the approaches we’ve discussed has been to map the responsibilities of a Curator within a semester-long internship to the 5 Cs of digital curation as outlined by Deschaine and Sharma (2015). The repository is doing the same thing for Collections Management Interns with the aim of increasing collaboration on different projects between students in each internship.

Collection Management: Among the many tasks in collections management is ensuring the institution's "Mission Statement" and "Collecting Policy" are used to guide decision-making. This provides a foundation for suitable collection management, training, education, and curation (physical and digital).

Categorization: Management of artefactual and non-artefactual materials from acquisition through further processing, storage, and usage. Categorization for many materials in the repository relies on standards for archival arrangement and description but also museum-based Nomenclature.

Critiquing: Arrangement and description of both artefacts, records and materials of varying formats up to and including in-depth collection research. Critiquing aids in the interpretation of materials within wider external or internal programming and events but also facilitates drawing connections between related materials.

Conceptualization: Selecting materials for use in wider exhibit programming following critiquing. As an iterative process that relies on critiquing materials, conceptualization is invaluable for drawing connections between related materials.

Circulation: Exhibits (physical and digital), research usage, and application of materials for specific projects/publications. Circulation is tracked via an exhibit-based registrar that also functions as a finding aid that lends itself to the interpretation of materials.

References

American Association of Museums. 2000. Code of Ethics for Museums. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.

Butler, Shelley, 1964- and Erica T, Lehrer. 2016. Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions. McGill-Queen's University Press.

Lubar, Steven D.. 2017. Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present. Harvard University Press.

Mason, Rhiannon, Alistair (Art museum director), Robinson and Emma Coffield. 2018. Museum and Gallery Studies: The Basics. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Society of American Archivists. "Copyright and Unpublished Material: An Introduction for Users of Archives and Manuscript Collections." 

Walhimer, Mark. 1964-. Museums 101 Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Scott Shipley, Fall 2024