Hello,

I hope you don’t mind a non-curator contributing to this really interesting discussion. I am an academic, and refer to myself as a social historian. Increasingly in our professions we are required to legitimate what we do and in a digital age, when younger people often think all knowledge can be found online via the click of a button, struggle with the idea of being an ‘expert’ in our subject areas. Our expertise often does lie in our methods and knowledge of how and where to access knowledge, especially when our quite specific job titles require us to have so many roles which often or perhaps largely take us away from direct engagements with sources and subject related materials. These pressures might also give us opportunities. The contributor below referred to working with communities and heritage groups but can I also add university academics? Collaboration of that kind can help with a range of issues, knowledge of secondary material, dissemination and one which was mentioned below publishing.

Alyson Brown (Edge Hill University)

From: Social History Curators Group email list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jenny Brown
Sent: 21 October 2014 18:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: what is a (social history) curator?

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Hello,

This is a very difficult question – I am proud to be a curator but often feel a bit buffeted by what is expected of me. I’m not sure whether the “curator as expert” is a historical reality, to be honest, or a stick we use to beat ourselves up with.

Starting out, I felt very conscious of not having a history degree but confident in my collections management role. There is a public perception of curators as experts, but this is often simply because we know more than the people we’re talking to. It’s enough to know how to find the answers when you don’t have the exact one to hand. We do become expert in some areas as we work with, study and research our collections – and this is an important role. How else can we decide what to collect, what to keep? How else do we ensure the research of volunteers and heritage groups we may be guiding is useful and accurate? I’m all for community engagement and empowering communities to inform our work, but don’t think it should reduce us to pure collections management. My biggest challenges here are a) people think I am being “elitist” to profess these views or b) there is no quantifiable output of research, so it gets sacrificed to the insistent KPIs of how many people I’ve talked to, how many enquiries I’ve answered, how much backlog I’ve catalogued.

In terms of social history, I think it is an approach (rather than a specific type of collection) and one used increasingly by our art and science colleagues in response to the democratisation of museum interpretation. This is great news but leaves me with the feeling that anyone must be able to do it… it would be great to have arguments to hand to support the need for specific SH curators and SH research.

Jenny

From: Social History Curators Group email list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Crispin Paine
Sent: 17 October 2014 12:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: what is a (social history) curator?

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Dear Clara and all

It’s good to see this debate come back again - I remember it as being energetically discussed in the 1970s! In those days, the ‘Curator' (i.e. Director) of a local authority museum was an important figure in the community, reporting to the Museum Committee and seeing himself (usually but not always him) as the equal of the Town Clerk. Then came Local Government Reorganisation, and museums were merged into large departments, often run by jumped-up swimming pool superintendents who styled themselves Leisure Officers, knew nothing about museums, and downgraded their curator to “manager”, probably at third or fourth tier.

The world has changed, but the title remains an honourable one - just as ‘curate’ refers to the cure of souls, ‘curator’ refers to the care of collections. However many other responsibilities the curator may have, even when they take up most of her or his time, responsibilities for the museum collection remains at its heart. What’s more, that’s how it’s understood by the public.

Everyone is a ‘Manager' or a ‘Director' these days - they mean nothing. Let’s celebrate our own unique title - wherever possible the head of a museum should be its ‘Curator’. Let’s resist its restriction to collection-specialists, and use it for the boss!

Crispin

On 17 Oct 2014, at 11:30, Ciara Canning <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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Hi All,

I know it’s Friday and the end of the week isn’t the best time to get the grey matter working but I’d like to get some input from SHCG members on the topic of ‘what is a social history curator’.

For those of you who attended this year’s SHCG conference in Glasgow you might remember that we started having conversations at AGM around the term ‘curator’ and whether the term was helpful or whether the historical associations with the title were outdated and restrictive.

What it means to be a curator seems to be a hot topic right now and it was also the subject of a session at Museums Association conference last week. The session was led by Cambridge University and mostly talking about science and fine art curatorial practice and with the time restrictions it didn’t give scope to delve too deeply.http://www.artandscienceofcuration.org.uk/

The social history curator wasn’t mentioned until someone raised it as a question. SHCG members could make some valuable contributions to the discussions and as a subject specialist network, it’s something we would like to actively look at with further research in the future.

The historical perception of ‘curator as expert’ or sole repositories of subject specialist knowledge appears to be something with which some social history curators are struggling. Many social history curators interpret and look after wide and varied collections and take on broader remits including active engagement, learning and social justice work. As financial cuts continue and more roles are being amalgamated, the social history curator – rather than other curatorial specialists appears to be taking on the role of generalist rather than specialist. Also, with many people who don’t have the job title ‘curator’ effectively delivering the same work - is social history curatorship a specialism or is it a methodology?

It reminds me of a quote by Judy Ling Wong:

‘Who we are and what we can achieve depends on how we see ourselves against the enormous pressure of how others see us’

So we would like to open the discussion up and bring together views from SHCG members.

To start things off I thought I’d signpost to some interesting reflections on the term ‘curator’ by Georgina Young –George is the Senior Curator of Contemporary collecting at Museum of London (MOL) but her thoughts reflect her own views and not necessarily those of MOL.

withgeorgeyoung - WordPress.com

Please share your thoughts through the list

Thanks

Ciara

Ciara Canning

Senior Curator (Community History),

Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service,

Museum Resource Centre,

14 Ryegate Road, Colchester, Essex, CO1 1YG

Tel 01206 282935

Fax 01206 282925

email [log in to unmask]

web www.cimuseums.org.uk

The SHCG list is provided for members of Social History Curators Group to discuss subjects relevant to social history in museums. To join SHCG visit www.shcg.org.uk . Opinions expressed in this email are the responsibility of the author and are not necessarily shared by SHCG. To leave the list do not reply to this message but send an email to [log in to unmask] with a blank subject line and these words as the body of the email: SIGNOFF SHCG-LIST