Working in a Large Museum

The Dream Job: Senior Registrar . . .

Shipping exhibition crates in January 2020

Yes, it finally happened! After my time at Royal Roads University, I at last got the job I had been training for my whole career, the one I was seeking for so long: I became the Senior Registrar at a large museum, the Royal BC Museum to be precise, in January 2015. My career journey had brought me to this point through my education, my experience, my interests and my professional development. I was ready to be a super-star registrar!

I began the job joining an exhibition installation that was well under way, and tasked to bring in loaned objects from all over. Loan agreements, shipping logistics, insurance, couriers . . . it was all mine to facilitate. And I loved it. I had documentation to organize, emails to send, people to call, arrangements to make. I was collaborating with curators, collections managers, exhibits colleagues, conservators, museum management, museum executive, lenders (and their personal assistants), government representatives, shipping companies, customs agents and security inside and outside the museum. All this work was to be completed within the deadline of the exhibition opening in mid-May. What a rush, what a feeling to get it open, and to have played a part in all of it. THIS is exactly what I had in mind when I set out to work in museums.

My desk during an exhibition installation. Weeee!

I was also responsible for organizing the Collections Committee meetings, which were in need of a review. I began by speaking to colleagues about what they thought worked, and what they thought needed changing. In a collection of natural history specimens, human history objects and archival holdings, there are many different perspectives. I visited each area - botany, entomology, palaeontology, vertebrates, invertebrates, modern history, Indigenous collections and archives - and began to gain an understanding of both the diversity of the collections and holdings and how it was important to create clear universal and simple policies and procedures for the intake and dispersal of these items. The Collections Committee was the place where all new acquisitions are reviewed, deaccessions are discussed and repatriations are documented. It also reviews / is the time for discussion if there are areas where policy should be updated, including thoughts on rapid-response collecting. These quarterly meetings were quite the event to coordinate and orchestrate - having the right amount of paperwork (but not too much) and knowing which items require attention and which others are routine acquisitions was a learning curve, but it was so important to the legal and ethical obligations of holding a collection in trust for the public at the provincial museum.

Registering new objects and specimens in the database, working on temporary exhibitions, managing loans in and out for both research (from the natural history collections) and exhibition (mostly from human history), as well as Collections Committee meetings kept me and the associate registrar very busy. We also worked to improve all process and procedures through the creation of workflows, and suggested policy changes. It was so very busy that I really didn't have a lot of time for writing here on the blog, or volunteering outside of the work I was doing at the RBCM. There were also challenging issues during this time, including navigating COVID and working from home, and the very difficult work of discussing colonialism / colonial practices and racism in the organization. There were interesting times as well, such as the announcement of the new Collections and Research Building . . . which meant even more work of preparing to move the massive collections of seven million objects, specimens and archival holdings to a new location. 

Although the Senior Registrar position was - and in many ways, still is - my dream job for museum work, I found that I was wanting to continue to grow professionally. I was so excited with the idea of moving all the collections and I wanted to play a key role at the management level, being at the meetings to plan for the move as well as, hopefully, the building of a whole new museum at the current location. I also wanted to really be a part of those hard, thoughtful discussions around colonialism and the changes that we needed to make. And so I took a leap of faith and applied for - and won! - the position of Director of Collections, which I started in October 2021.

Next Step: Daring to Lead . . .

My leadership / support / management style is largely based on Brene Brown's "awkward, brave and kind" philosophy of showing up to be the front person of a team with vulnerability and courage. I knew I was taking a pretty big risk stepping out of a unionized position, as there was a new CEO to start soon . . .  it was a time of change and upheaval. But I also share Brene's admiration of the Roosevelt quote below: I was ready to step up and get into that arena!

In this director role I was responsible for work plans for the natural and modern history collections managers as well as the registration team. We had to do all the regular work and plan for a new collections building on top of that. I was tasked to run competitions to hire four permanent staff as well as a team of technicians to work to get the collections ready to go (there were 99 applicants for one competition!!). And I thought I was busy in the Senior Registrar role . . . some pretty long days were had, with a team of nearly twenty on the roster.

Among all this work came the official government announcement that there would be a new building on the site where the museum stood, closing the exhibition galleries for years during the rebuild. I won't put a link to the day's events but, as you may have guessed, it did not go over well. Less than two months later, the downtown project was cancelled, and public opinion was low of the museum, despite the fact that it used to be such a beloved institution. The way the project was launched and how quickly it was pulled back made for even more stressful times within the museum.

I was soldiering on with the plans for the move of the collections and supporting the Collections team by providing a safety net and a hand-up where I could. But, as someone in the arena, I was vulnerable . . . and the new CEO wanted to make organizational changes. Sometimes, if you're in a leadership role, you make a hard decision; sometimes you deliver a hard decision; sometimes you receive a hard decision. That last one was where I found myself, along with two other museum directors (research and learning), as we were walked out of the building, our positions eliminated, released without cause. After over seven and a half years at the museum, this was the abrupt end to my dream I had pursued with my whole being . . . and it has been very long, hard road to recover from that moment.

In my next post, I delve into the lessons learned from my museum work journey thus far, which have been mighty! One thing remains certain about this latest walk down my path: I have no regrets about taking on that management role. I know museums as a whole are going through tough times, and we all have to be courageous and stand up to say we are going to be a part of the solution, not sit it out. I don't know what my future holds, or where or how I will serve museums next, but I remain brave, I remain passionate, and I remain strong.