The career of museum curator is a challenging and rewarding one that offers a broad array of opportunities in museums in government, educational and private sectors. Keenly competitive, there are more qualified applicants with graduate degrees than there are job openings as museum curator. Museum curators carry out an array of responsibilities and duties in their role, but these often vary considerably depending on whether one works for a public, educational or private museum. Nearly half a century ago, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) devised the "Position Classification Standard for Museum Curator" in February, 1962 (Position 1). This standard provides four "conceptual cornerstones" that are the foundation of modern museums: 1) research, 2) collection, 3) exhibits, and 4) education (Position 2). Any understanding of the museum curator in any culture must be based on these concepts of curatorial activity in order to understand the role and its duties and responsibilities.
Museum curators perform essential functions; require specific knowledge, skills and abilities, and they must be flexible in the sense that they play diverse roles from a professor of history to a skilled designer of exhibits. One professional curator organization, AGCAS, describes a museum curator as someone that "acquires, cares for, develops, displays and interprets a collection of artifacts or works of art in order to inform, educate and entertain the public" (Spilman 1). This analysis of the roles and responsibilities of the museum curator will show this to be a narrow definition of the occupation, primarily based on differences in museums and owners of them. Many curators travel the globe continually searching for new finds for their museums' collections.
This analysis will provide a discussion of the roles and responsibilities of the museum curator across various types of museums and in general. In depth inf...