Wanted: Fathomable Job Title

“Yeah, but what do you really want to do?”

“People do that?”

“Oooo, so you get to play with dinosaur bones?”

All three of these comments were taken from a dinner party I attended last week, where upon asking what I did for a living, the answer produced three of the four most common responses. (The fourth is a simple “Oh, cool.” and nothing else, because quite simply, the speaker has no clue what a registrar is and are pretty sure it would be something rather boring that they’d rather you not expound upon.)

Curious if this was a trend amongst museum professionals, I posed the questions to both my co-workers and to a museum list-serve. Of all the responses given, these three (or some variation thereof) were among the front runners. T.H. Gray, a fellow museum colleague, had this to say:

“Museums are experienced in interpreting history, art, and science to non-professionals. Unfortunately, we are not so adept at interpreting ourselves. We throw around unfamiliar terms like interpretation, deaccession, and ethics to describe what we do.

This jargon extends to our job titles. The standard term is museum professional. It’s kind of like “medical practitioner” – it could mean a medical doctor or a witch doctor, you don’t truly know. There are the old standards of educator, curator, registrar, collections manager, and director, but these ignore the influx of non-traditional employees such as the marketing department. Curator came close to being an encompassing professional term. Once there were curators of collections, curators of exhibitions, and curators of education. Then the idea of curators became synonymous with wicked stepmothers, the ones who locked treasures (be they stepdaughters or not) away. So, like the stepmother, the term was cast aside in favor of director (as in director of exhibitions). Just as well. Could you take the curator of development seriously?

Of course, there was a perceived need to establish our authority. This gave us the pseudo-scientific “museologist.” It also inspired other fun and meaningless titles including museum technician (white lab coats, anyone?), interpretive specialist (what language do you speak?), and museum specialist (an ingenious combination of the previous two).

You may not think our current titles are a problem, but have you ever tried to explain what you do to a stranger at a bar? You usually wind up saying something like you work with artifacts, prompting them to make an Indiana Jones reference (they get points for quoting the “mommy” lines from Temple of Doom). This is further proof that no one really understands museums because we can’t explain it ourselves.

So in an effort to live up to our ever changing role as cultural steward and/or inspiration and honor the etymology of the field, I humbly suggest we reclaim the title Muse. As in, “What do you do?” “I am a Muse.” It would certainly make casual bar hook-ups more interesting. Until you have to explain what a muse is.

PS For those of you not content with being a muse you can always be an oracle.”

Problem solved. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to see Elaine about getting my business cards changed to read “Muse.”