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Museum technicians are responsible for placing, caring for, and displaying artifacts or documents held by a museum. They perform a wide range of tasks including manual labor, detailed analysis, educational outreach, and fundraising. They work primarily outside the public sphere and assist curators in their roles. The tasks performed by museum technicians can range from simple to complex, and they can specialize in a particular area of research. Advanced technicians innovate within their field of expertise and are responsible for growth in the field of restoration and storage.
Museum technicians, along with archivists and curators, are responsible for the placement, care, and display of artifacts or documents held by a museum. She can perform a wide range of tasks including manual labor, detailed analysis, educational outreach and fundraising. Often distinguished from curators or archivists by their more technical expertise, museum technicians tend to work primarily outside the public sphere, focusing on working with museum artifacts.
Depending on the level of museum technician, the tasks she performs may be of the simpler and more menial variety, or they may be quite detailed and complex. Generally, she acts as the museum’s support staff, assisting the curators in their roles and helping to ensure that the museum runs smoothly. A museum technician is an important part of a museum’s operation and, given the highly specialized nature of the role, as well as the specialized protocols in place in most museums, it can be quite a draining job.
At the basic level, a museum technician helps with the simplest of tasks that need to be carried out around a museum. For example, a museum technician might be involved in janitorial and custodial duties around fragile artifacts or displays. Because most exhibits are delicate, they often cannot be cleaned the way a carpet or office building could be. Rather, this type of cleaning requires a lot of care and attention, as well as a good understanding of the artifacts themselves.
More advanced technicians can act as a direct support team for senior technicians or curators. In this context, she may be asked to retrieve or store samples, help catalog records and artifacts, clean samples or store them carefully, or prepare them for use by a more advanced technician or curator. She may also work in a secretarial or educational role, preparing documents for public distribution, writing correspondence, and acting as a guide to museum exhibits.
An intermediate museum technician may also choose to specialize in a very focused area of research in which to work. If so, she will likely remain in that specialty throughout her career, as the skills gained tend to be incredibly particular. She might, for example, learn to restore a specific type of artifact, such as ceramic bowls, and her work from then on might focus on all of the ceramic bowls in the museum’s collection. Choosing a focus like this is often the path to becoming an advanced museum technician once enough of the skill has been acquired.
Advanced technicians work to help innovate within their specific field of expertise. A ceramic bowl specialist, for example, can no longer simply restore bowls of known types using pre-existing techniques; now she can work on developing new techniques to better restore bowls or apply older techniques to a new type of bowl. This level of museum technician is responsible for much of the growth taking place in the field of restoration and storage, and it can be a lucrative profession for those who want to make it this far.
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