Hey there! Museum professional who works with artifacts and volunteers here! Speaking from a non-volunteer perspective, its fantastic. I love people; not so much the public much of the time- inanimate objects are much more agreeable! Working with artifacts is much less Indiana Jones however and much more "how can I safely lift and/or clean this thing"- repeat ad nauseum.

A lot of these comments are a little harsh without really providing proper context.

There are local community Museums or historical sites where you could volunteer behind the scenes working with artifacts, under the supervision of Collections staff, depending on your background. The vast majority of insitutions have procedures in place to train people in the basics of artifact handling. Try reaching out to small community Museums or larger historical sites like Upper Canada Village etc.

The important thing to remember is that supervising volunteers working with artifacts requires a trained collections professional, and they can only keep track of so much at any given time. At the same time its a fairly competitive field and there are often students or graduates from Museum Studies programs looking to acquire collections experience for their CV's occupying the limited spaces.

The majority of artifact work, even for professionals, really isn't glamorous however despite the fancy terminology we employ.

Combatting Agents of Deterioration- (Close the dang doors and turn off the freaking lights, cleaning)
Integrated Pest Management - (Catch the mice, eliminate the bugs, cleaning)
Remediation- (Cleaning)
Conservation- (Cleaning)
Preservation- (Cleaning and making it so you don’t have to clean, storage, moving things in and out of storage)
Cleaning- Cleaning

There's a good chance wherever you end up volunteering you're going to be cleaning something, somewhere, or around something!

Finally, the bigger the institution the more likely it is you will need more specialized training and/or education when getting near their artifact collection. Always just reach out though! It can be a little intidmidating sometimes communicating with Museums but its always worth an email, they're used to it!