King Manor in Context
“How do you know all this?”
Conceptualize your own museum!
Here’s me hanging out in the North Kitchen getting ready for a Hands on History family program!
Hello, everyone! My name is Brittany Lester, and I am the Director of Education at King Manor Museum. I often tell people that working at a museum is an exciting, challenging, and fun career to have. And it is! But lots of people don’t know what exactly I do, or what my coworkers do. They aren’t sure how museums create exhibits or how we find information on the objects in the house and the people who lived there. In fact, the most common question I get from kids of all ages on school tours is: “How do you know all this?”
So, I thought I’d answer that question for everyone. You’re going to get a sneak peek into how museums work by conceptualizing your own museum at home.
Museums can bring communities together to talk about important issues, share their experiences, or even just to look at beautiful objects. But when you visit a museum, there is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. A museum needs a theme, a mission statement, and a collection long before they can make their first exhibit. And to get any of that, they also need staff!
A note for educators
This is a much more in-depth lesson than our other King Manor in Context resources, so don’t stress if you can’t do it all in one day. Spread it out, especially with students who need brain breaks. The concepts and activities in this lesson are generally geared for grades 4-8 and may require adult assistance and/or involvement.
Step 1: Who works at the museum?
There are lots of different people who work at museums, depending on what the museum does and what they need. Today, we’re going to be thinking mostly about curators and museum educators.
Curator
A curator takes care of the museum’s collections, or objects. They protect the often-fragile collections from mold, dirt, pests, temperature, and even the passage of time, which is called preservation. Preservation actually involves a lot of science, especially chemistry!
Ever tried to find something you needed in a messy closet? It’s a lot harder than if it were clean, right? Curators also make sure the collection is easy to find, by cataloging and organizing all of the objects so they can be stored safely and used for exhibits.
Curators do a lot of research too. At King Manor, our curators read books about the 19th century so they understand more about the world these objects came from. They look at primary source documents from the 1800s, like letters, diaries, and even shopping lists! Many curators go to graduate school to learn these special skills. They use their expertise in material culture (the study of physical objects and how they relate to human culture) to make educated statements about the objects in the collection.
Museum Educator
If you’ve ever been on a school tour at a museum, or taken a guided tour with your family and friends, the person leading that tour may have been a museum educator! Museum educators are a little like teachers at a school, but have had special training to work at their museums. Many museum educators have college and/or graduate degrees in education and other subjects, and some are also qualified to teach at a public school.
Museum educators use the museum as their classroom. They come up with lesson plans for school tours, they plan community festivals and events, and they make online content for the community to use. They connect all of these lessons and events to the objects and themes that the curators come up with, and use the curator’s research (or sometimes their own), to help visitors understand and learn from what they are seeing and doing.
King Manor staff Kelsey and Mike building a new vitrine in our front hall!
More Museum Professionals
There are many, many more types of jobs at museums than just curators and museum educators. There are visitor services associates who help visitors book tours, direct visitors around the museum, and help you throughout your visit. There are site managers, who keep the museum running smoothly when visitors are there, especially during events. There are maintenance workers and caretakers who keep the museum clean and protect the objects in the collections from leaky pipes, dirt, or other problems. There are executive directors who oversee the operations of the museum, manage the rest of the staff, and talk to donors who support the museum monetarily. All of these jobs are important and make sure that a museum is a welcoming space for the community.
Share your thoughts
Tell someone else: Which of these two jobs – curator or museum educator – sounds like the most fun? Do you think you would enjoy either one of these as your career? Why or why not?
Making Your Museum: You’re Hired!
Congratulations, you’ve been hired as the curator or the museum educator at your own museum (what was that interview like, I wonder?). If you have other family members who want to join in, maybe you could make this a joint effort and give each person the role of either curator or museum educator. If there’s only one of you, or if you can’t decide, awesome! You get to be both. At small museums like King Manor (or your museum) where there aren’t many staff members, sometimes I help with curator tasks and sometimes the curators help me with my museum education tasks!
Okay – you have your staff, now let’s make a museum!
Our Curatorial Assistant, Hannah, working on interpreting Rufus King’s guest bedroom on the second floor.
Step 2: What kind of museum are you?
There are lots of different kinds of museums! There are art museums, science museums, culture museums, military museums, history museums, and more! King Manor is a historic house museum. We interpret (meaning we research to the best of our ability and display objects that align with that research) the King family home between the years 1810 and 1850 in the United States.
Making Your Museum: Choose a Theme
What kind of museum do you want to create? You could make it a museum of art, with your own art, and/or other artists (don’t forget to give them credit!). You could even make it a history museum about your own family, or a natural history museum featuring your stuffed animals. You can get super specific too. Here are some examples:
An art museum that only shows art with flowers in it.
A science/natural history museum that’s only about hedgehogs.
A history or culture museum that only talks about Puerto Rican culture.
A technology museum about Fortnite.
You should choose a theme that you have some knowledge about. So, if you don’t know much about hedgehogs, choose something else you do know a lot about! Once you decide what your topic will be, give your new museum a name! Make a sign to welcome visitors, if you like.
Pro Tip
Most museums will have their mission statements published on their websites, which is a great way to find out what a museum wants to teach you about before you go visit! Can you find King Manor’s mission statement?
Step 3: What is your mission?
Museums are places of learning, community, and connection. Most museums are non-profits, so the museum only uses its money to create programs, tours, exhibits, and for operating the museum. So, it’s important that we figure out how we want to serve our community so we can do our best to achieve those goals! One of the most important ways museums do that is by forming a mission statement. Think of a mission statement as something that tells people who visit your museum what your museum does for your community and why that’s important. It sets a goal for the museum and helps the staff to focus on that goal.
If making a mission statement sounds easy, it’s not. In fact, museums often have a very difficult time choosing the perfect mission statement, even if they know what kind of work they want to do in their community. Museums may go through many mission statements over the years, sometimes because they’re still searching for the right one, and sometimes because what they do and how they do it is different now. Museums, just like people, are always changing and growing and trying to improve.
Making Your Museum: Write Your Mission Statement
A good mission statement shouldn’t be very long. Two sentences is plenty! And don’t be discouraged if you get frustrated and can’t seem to come up with the right way to say it. Even seasoned museum professionals find this part very difficult. You can use the example option below and fill in the blanks, or make up your own!
[NAME OF MUSEUM]’s mission is [WHAT YOUR MUSEUM DOES], because [WHY YOUR MUSEUM DOES IT].
A 2018 vitrine exhibit at King Manor which talked about floral patterns in everyday 18th and 19th century objects. Curated by Kelsey Brow.
Step 4: What’s in your collection?
Now that you know what kind of museum you want and what your mission statement is, now you need to gather and build your collection. When a curator creates a collection, they think about the museum’s theme and mission statement before they add an object to the museum. The objects in our collections help us tell visitors a story when they put them into an exhibit. If your museum is about hedgehogs, you’re probably not going to add a basketball to the collection, right? That doesn’t make much sense.
In the early 20th century (1900s), when museums in the United States were still very new, curators would think about the theme of the museum, but they wouldn’t think about a mission statement. When that happens, museums end up getting a lot of objects that are really interesting, but might not help the museum tell the story they want to tell. King Manor had that problem too when we first became a museum 120 years ago. The women who created the museum were so excited about showing historic objects that they collected absolutely anything they thought was related to Rufus King. For example: Rufus King worked with George Washington during the American Revolution and in Congress. So the women hung up a portrait of George Washington at King Manor, even though Rufus definitely didn’t have one in his house (imagine putting a giant photo of your boss on your living room wall!). They also collected too much of one type of item. King Manor once had seven couches! That’s way too many couches for one house!
Today, museums have very different rules and ideas than they did in 1900. King Manor’s curators think about the story they’re going to tell, and they think about their mission statement. They choose objects carefully and make sure the object works with the rest of the collection. This is called curating and collections management.
Museums also love to share! Sometimes, King Manor has something another museum needs that we don’t. Or another museum has something that we need that they don’t need. So, we’ll borrow, trade, or loan our objects! Museums really like to help each other out, because in the long run it helps everyone better serve their communities.
Making Your Museum: Manage Your Collection
Let’s curate your own collection! Time to find objects. For your museum, these can be items that you have in your home or even objects and art you or others have created yourself to add. It might require some research too – use the resources you have, like books, internet, and the expertise of people you know.
Make sure to ask the people in your household to borrow objects if you want to include something that isn’t yours. When borrowing objects, a real museum forms a loan agreement with the object’s owner, where they discuss how the object should be cared for and how long the museum can have it. It’s an honor to receive an object from a loan giver; there’s a lot of trust involved.
When choosing an object to add to the collection, ask yourself the following questions:
Does this object fit my museum’s theme?
What do I want people to learn from this object?
How can I connect my object to my museum’s goal, or mission statement?
Don’t worry if you don’t end up with a lot of objects in your collection! Did you know that you can make a whole exhibit which just one or two objects? King Manor does small exhibits in a glass case (called a vitrine) that usually have only a few items inside.