A California Dream . . .
From Volunteer to Grad School to Exhibitions Registrar

I wasn't long in Edmonton before an opportunity came up to go to California as spouse on a Free Trade visa, moving there to follow the (first) internet boom. We thought we'd go for just a year or so, to see what it was like, and ended up staying for ten. In these years I volunteered, went to graduate school and then worked in California museums, all the while we had two kids and bought a house and made great friends. It was an amazing decade with a lot of unique experiences for this Canadian gal, one that was very formative along my museum path.

The US didn't need people with History degrees (I know, right?!) as much as they required those with Computer Science and so I was back to my volunteer world as I was not able to obtain a work visa under Free Trade. Lucky for me, I found two amazing places to give my time, and grow my museum experience. For the first year, I was able to dedicate a day a week each at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology on campus at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at the Oakland Museum of California. Both experiences were so thought-provoking, with a lot of learning, and each had staff and fellow volunteers that were very welcoming. At the Hearst Museum, I worked with the Native American basket collection. This was until I said I was expecting a baby . . . and then I was promptly moved to a Japanese netsuke collection as there were a lot of concerns about pesticides used to 'preserve' the baskets. (This was the first time I had really understood what museums did to many Indigenous objects, and I was pretty shocked. I had much more to learn.) At the Oakland Museum, I worked in the History department, and was taught on their database how to properly catalogue and complete data entry. I worked in the storage rooms, and remember how one time I was given a big sheet of foam-core and asked to build a box with a glassine window, so the object could be seen without opening the box. (Oh, how to learn to think in multiple dimensions!) It was a great experience.

As mentioned, I got to work with amazing people. I met an intern at the Oakland Museum from John F. Kennedy University who told me all about their Museum Studies program, specializing in collections management. I was blown away that such a thing might exist! I was given information and an application form and applied when the baby was just a few months old . . . and got accepted (and so I applied for and got a student visa). I started just before she turned a year old, and it was a balance for sure. It was a program designed for working professionals, though, and so classes were in the evenings which meant I had childcare. AND the baby loved to nap, so I had great amounts of time during the day to do my readings and coursework . . . totally doable for this great program of amazing conversations, hard assignments and INCREDIBLY cool field trips, meeting fascinating museum people all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I was in dreamland in this program. 

For my first assignment at JFKU, I had to visit a Bay Area cultural entity
so I took the babe to the the SF Zoo
and wrote about a family visitor experience.

Part of the program was to complete a bazillion hours* of unpaid internship. I worked at two very different museums, getting two unique experiences. My first one was at the Provincial Museum of Alberta, working on a project to reorganize, rehouse and inventory a military cap badge collection. I went back to the PMA because my mum could watch my daughter while I worked full time for a couple of months. It was a balance (again) but we made it work . . . I just wish the supplies had come in sooner because it was such a stress to wait for these very-precise boxes to show up! But they eventually did, phew. The other was at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where I completed paperwork to prepare arms and armour from the collection for deaccession and supported the registration department wherever I was needed. I completed this internship over a longer period of time as I was back at school by then, and I had to commute from the East Bay. I learned a lot there . . . and I found out how interesting it was to work in an art museum. (*may not be an accurate number!)

The final stage of the degree was the masters project. Incredible. So much work. So much angst to find the topic then narrow it and have the topic approved. Once narrowed down, I sent out a survey to make sure it was a topic that made sense for museum professionals in the field. Through that survey, I uncovered that the donor's point of view was rarely part of the information gathered when an object was being considered for the collection. I therefore further researched and then wrote my project and called it "Honoring the Spirit of Donation: Documenting Donors' Perspectives in Collecting Museums". This was a fascinating story to me as it involved not only the documentation of the physical object but also the story behind why a donor thought an object was so important to them that it belonged in a museum. My product from this research - because we were not just supposed to talk about a challenge, but to provide an answer to it - was that I developed a form to facilitate a conversation with the donor at the time of donation. This simple step added a personal dimension to the value of the object, and brought in a way to share the authority of the object's documentation. (If you're interested in a template of the form, please send me an email that you can customize to your collection's needs.)

After graduation, I was able to get a work visa and worked in a few places in the Bay Area, including a children's toy museum and contract work for some small history museums. I also got back to the Oakland Museum of California, this time in the Education Department, where I was responsible for obtaining permissions for historical images that were to be used in their Gold Rush curriculum guides. Later on, I was the OMCA's Art Department registrar for exhibitions, which was an amazing experience that deserves its own blog post, it was just so cool: I managed logistics, I went to an artist's home, I oversaw couriers and of course organized the paperwork of the temporary exhibitions for the art department. It was a challenging role but it allowed me to use all the knowledge and skills I had gained throughout my museum experience and education. 

And so after a decade of working with / through visa requirements while balancing family needs, we made a decision that it was time to move back North. My museum journey in California was such a valuable and memorable experience that has stayed with me: I learned so much through my studies and my work in the rich museum environment in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a time that shaped my career and continues to inspire me as I move forward . .  you might say it was a dream come true!

Well, I certainly kept my documents from California!
Daytimes, planners, portfolios and master's project.
Oh, and journals. Don't forget the journals. 

My Definition of a Museum

But . . . but what about the . . .

Once upon a time, I was a student in the Master of Arts Museum Studies program at John F. Kennedy University in California.  In my cohort, there were two main specializations in the program — collections management and public programming — and they ran side by side. All the students were together for the core foundation courses, then we broke out into the respective groups for in-depth specialization classes. We also wrote our master's thesis on a topic to add to the literature / learning of our specialization.

Being in collections management, I honestly thought that I would see far more registrar-types than those interested in public programming. Boy, was I wrong! It turns out that in a class of (I believe) 12, there were only FOUR in collections management. I was shocked, really, and so the first lesson of this amazing program was that I was never to be sure what is going to happen in my own personal definition of the museum world.

The core courses were so interesting and so very challenging. These classes, often led by the phenomenal Gail Anderson, emphasized the community, and the educational mandate of museums. It was repeatedly stated that, without people, museums are not worth a whole lot with their packed-full rooms of collections. This was a bit of a shocker to me at the time, for I had always loosely defined museums as places that collect things that tell a story - it was about The Object. Yet we discussed that museums can exist without collections, but not without people.

WHAT? Wait a minute.

Museums without collections? This thought shocked me. The conversation kept being pushed — museums are first and foremost places of learning for people, not Mausoleums of Stuff. (Ouch.) Museums can keep things forever but if no one sees the collections, what's the point? Why spend all that money and energy putting things on those pedestals, and keeping them carefully tucked away in storage? Again and again it was stressed that if we, as museum professionals, were not serving our audience and community, we were in fact engaged in organizations that simply idolized and interpreted material goods. And so what about that? This seemingly endless discussion actually got my back up a little - hey, if there are no collections needed in museums, there are no collections MANAGERS. Are 'they' trying to get rid of me and my profession? And curators? And conservators? With the majority of the class being education-centric, it certainly seemed like my voice from the registrars' section was getting a little over-run. And so I kept rebuking, over and over again:

But — What about The Collections?

How DO collections fit into this museum definition of education and people first, things second?  This was the central question of my museum studies, and it was the heart of master's project in collections management, when I designed a form that documented the object donor's story at the time the object was given to the museum. From a collections manager point of view, I saw that having the community document their own donations as an important step in sharing the task of interpreting the collection in the museum.

And then I went back into the museum world . . .

. . . where the work often comes before the conversations of why we do what we do . . .

. . . and where the education side of museum professionals rarely out-number the object-centric museum specialists.

There I discovered that, somewhat to my initial relief, history, art and natural history museums were still, in my opinion, focussed on the object. Some exhibitions were practically alters. Some curators were the experts, and they owned the story that visitors heard and learned from. And accessibility, welcoming visitors? Sharing authority? Pretty much back burner. Educational programs seemed to be afterthoughts to the exhibitions. Mission statements started with 'To collect, preserve the stuff of the community'. It seemed to me that objects were the centre; my side of museum work seemed rather protected. But I didn't feel smug. In fact, I felt worried and a little sick at this realization of the museum sector in action.

Then, of course, it hit me. 

But — What about The Community?

All the discussions from my time at JFKU rang in my ears. Despite my rants to protect the object's role in the definition of a museum, this adoration of collections without thinking about the community is, well, not a sustainable way to gather supporters, whether they be visitors or funders or fans. Only in a few cases will the object come before the interest of the visitor, so the collections should not be the only focus of what we do. If the museum values and welcomes its visitors, makes people the first priority, our communities just might see all these museums belong to them. And then maybe, just maybe, they will stay and play and participate in this ever-so-cool learning environment, for it will be for the visitor, and about the visitor. It truly is not just about the collection, or for those who adore the museum objects.

In coming full circle of my unique learning situation and professional experience, I have become aware of a few things. Museums to me are defined as places of education that hold collections in trust for the community. I personally need to keep collections as one of the central tennets that define a museum for I am and always will be passionate about the things that tell the stories of the world around us. But I also know this: I absolutely, without a doubt, cannot leave out the community in this definition: PEOPLE are the reason why museums do what museums do. Always. The collection and the community's experience — including educational — are together for me, and I use these fundamentals equally when I define what is a museum. No buts about it.