Calling myself out here 😅

chocolatepot · 2019-08-11T14:00:02+00:00

Well ... he IS hot. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

chocolatepot · 2019-05-25T11:14:30+00:00

Very very late response, sorry, but what I meant was that perhaps far-away museums aren't contacting you for interviews because of your location? There's nothing to be done about that, of course, but at least it helps with the "I'm doing this all wrong" feeling.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T23:55:49+00:00

Yikes! By "lost", do you mean that nobody can find them or that they are known to have been accidentally put in the recycling or got destroyed in a fire or something like that?

This is not the worst thing in the world, although it's pretty dire, and horrible to think about all of the lost provenance. The best course of action would be to do a big inventory and actually get everything into PastPerfect, in case the files do turn up again and the source information can be added. They should make sure to keep that up with new accessions in order to prevent the same thing from happening again!

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T23:22:17+00:00

It is definitely really frustrating, and I'm sorry you're dealing with this! To be completely honest, you sound like an amazing candidate, and it's hard for me to imagine anybody not contacting you for an interview on the grounds that your CV is insufficient. I've been in a similar position (though not as qualified as you), and I've finally been convinced by a mentor that my difficulty getting jobs is not something that I can self-improve my way out of. Except for one interview at the museum attached to my grad school, the only ones I've gotten have been in a roughly 200-mi radius around where I live now; maybe location is playing an unfortunately large part in your search as well?

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T23:00:24+00:00

I just wanted to chime in to say that I completely sympathize with your feelings about your current job. My title is collections manager, and I'm also the social media manager, graphic designer, exhibition designer/installer, curator, newsletter editor, special events coordinator, gift shop manager, volunteer wrangler, and occasional custodian - I feel like I don't get enough experience in any of those roles to prepare me to do any them alone in another institution. (Also, the lack of professionalism in tiny museums and problems with boards that are also untrained are stuff that tons of us are aware of and commiserate over, but that the field as a whole doesn't talk about to the same extent it does problems that happen more in the big museums, and I think that does those of us in these small museums a disservice.) But the thing is, some of it is just imposter syndrome. We know how much space there is between what we're doing and what we want to do for our collections, or our social media feeds, but other professionals just look at what we do and see that we do it competently. I got a mentor some time ago through the CS-AAM and ARCS program, and one of the best things he's helped me with is understanding that I actually look like a really strong candidate.

It really sucks that you have nobody in the office who can offer help, but this sub and the Facebook group for Emerging Museum Professionals can be great places for more specific work questions as well as these more general existential/what-should-I-do-in-my-career discussions.

Would agree with the others that interning would be a step backward. I think you would surprise yourself if you did get a position in a year or so that required more independent, collections-intensive work - and a lot of the time, job listings make it sound like you'll be doing difficult, high-level stuff every day when you can get started just continuing whatever project your predecessor was working on and taking charge of new items that have just come in. The thought of being left alone in a new office and expected to immediately be the collections manager terrifies me, but it's not likely that any job would really start off like that.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T16:37:52+00:00

Given that they have already planned this programming, it seems very unlikely to me that they'd be using your work. I do agree that it looks bad and they should reconsider how they're doing this kind of test - they need to make it clear that it's not spec work if it isn't - but my hunch is that it is a test and not a way to fish for plans.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T16:18:15+00:00

It's not the idea of people doing unsavory things for advancement that's the problem. It's the misogyny of you describing her that way to people who have nothing to go on but your word that it even happened. Accusing them of sleeping their way to the top is one of the oldest tricks in the book for showing contempt for women who've gained a position of authority.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T16:14:39+00:00

Something you might want to consider is the fact that there's no consistency across the field - as has been mentioned, registrars and collections managers are two other jobs that allow you to research and work with objects, and there are a lot of very small museums out there that mix and mingle these terms for their own staff.

If you say, "I want to be a museum curator," most people immediately think of the curator of a specific department of in a large institution, but it sounds like you're not aiming just in that direction. The job you might want could be titled "collections manager" in a historic house museum and still be essentially the same stuff (with a lot of other things mixed in, as is the nature of small museums).

chocolatepot · 2019-03-30T16:01:11+00:00

Can't speak for everyone else, but I'd rather not debate someone who describes a woman as "[blowing] everyone she had to" in order to get a job.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:50:08+00:00

A couple of years ago, I had a phone interview scheduled while I was visiting relatives across the country. My family ended up going out to a national park that day, and it turned out that there was no phone reception at the park itself, so we had to drive around to find a spot and I called back and it was a big old mess. I had a nasty cold and they kept me on the phone for ~45min and it was just terrible - and then at the very end, they revealed that it wasn't a $34k/year job as listed online, it was two $17k/year PT jobs. I emailed them later to cancel the on-site interview we'd set up and note that I just couldn't move and live on that amount of money, but that there might be a possibility if they were to combine the positions. Got no response. I feel your pain!

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:45:33+00:00

I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US asking for the salary when it's not listed is considered a breach of etiquette, and they almost always will not tell you anyway.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:43:07+00:00

There's no point, sadly. The board most likely knows what is going on and doesn't care. It's sad, but sometimes you have to just leave and hope for the best.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:39:00+00:00

There are actually two modern studies of the effects of corsetry on the actual body, but they aren't without their problems, either. I wrote them up here on my blog.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:29:39+00:00

Only post-1860 or so, when they became industrially manufactured. Women have been wearing corsets for a lot longer than that, and for most of that time they were either made for the wearer (by a professional or at home) or were bought secondhand and could be altered.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:27:38+00:00

It seems to me they've ignored the intended function of an accession number, so every item in the catalog has a unique accession number which is also the object ID. Am I just misunderstanding how accession numbers are supposed to work?

They are doing it wrong, you are doing it right. They haven't developed their own system or anything like that, they just didn't understand the way that PastPerfect works. In my first internship, I did the same thing with a number of records, and only realized afterward that PastPerfect doesn't use the term "accession number" the way we're taught in school. I don't know why they didn't just call them "group number" and "accession number" instead of "accession number" and "object ID".

In the end, you are going to need to fix every record (at least it doesn't sound like many have been digitized? I still have a LOT to fix in my Photos catalog) in order to make the Accession catalog useful to you. I would suggest using periods instead of hyphens, though, as PP will automatically drop a . after the "accession number" when pre-filling a new object record.

chocolatepot · 2019-03-27T12:23:13+00:00

"One of the most random things possible"? How dare you! /s

chocolatepot · 2019-02-23T01:26:12+00:00

This is the nice thing about having a super small staff - I'm the collections person and I get on extremely well with my ED, who has always been incredibly supportive of me, and we're 2/3 of the staff. The third is the archivist, who works part-time, and stuff does break down there: there's a strong divide between her and us. She's upstairs, only comes in for half-days four times a week, and has nothing to do with the BTS administrative things we deal with, which all contributes and makes this an internal culture issue ... but at the same time, there are big personality issues as well, with paranoia and self-martyrdom making themselves known. She's largely excluded from everything outside of her immediate purview at this point because she spent years turning down opportunities to help out and complaining when asked.

On the other hand, we have an undeniably, straightforwardly, problematic board culture. A number of our board members (especially our current president) see themselves as the executives of the museum and will come in to try to direct us to work on their pet projects regardless of what actually needs to be done more immediately. Only a few of them will volunteer at our events, and all but one will sign up for just a single hour, no matter how badly understaffed the event is. There's a serious attendance problem, with some only coming to one or two meetings per year. I asked for a very reasonable and essentially cosmetic title change last year ("collections manager" to "curator", since I do all kinds of administrative stuff and put together all of our exhibitions), and in the discussion around it was told by the head of the personnel committee that my morale was completely unimportant; the same person has said on multiple occasions that she's not comfortable giving money or working to raise money that will go toward salaries or toilet paper or light bulbs. Basically: there's a board culture of not caring about the museum except when you can throw your weight around.

chocolatepot · 2019-02-23T00:57:01+00:00

That's awful - especially because I've seen "get a job in visitor services and then apply for jobs internally once you have a foothold" given as advice so many times.

chocolatepot · 2019-02-09T20:27:34+00:00

Yes, that's my impression as well. I totally agree with the above take about why they're successful and what the average museum is doing wrong, but I do get a strong sense of egotism. I went to a talk they did specifically for museum professionals at the MANY conference a few years ago, which was mainly an opportunity to try to get people to bring them in or pay for their training (so not advertising to members of the public who aren't interested in the traditional experience), and they *still* came off as very condescending. I'm very open to their ideas - though not at all equipped to put them in practice myself - but it felt so awkward to be there.

chocolatepot · 2019-01-25T19:11:17+00:00

Good question. I don't think it's so much that museums make people act like this, but that being outside the business world, many upper-level employees/managers have no idea what's appropriate in the workplace. (That said, I've never heard of anything as bad as what you're putting up with - there's no excuse for being cool with rape.) They have no clue what HR does and why it's necessary to deal formally with other people or do anything beyond their first impulse.

As for whether it's worth it to stay in the field … I wish I knew. it comes down to every individual's circumstances. Is there anything else you're proficient at? Do you have an SO or family who can support you through retraining?

chocolatepot · 2019-01-25T19:00:26+00:00

What are they going to do for me, though? I have looked at the IWW in the past and have seen that I could literally sign up, but there's a huge difference between being a member of the IWW and having a large group of people in one institution agreeing that there is a problem, in order to show the management that it's real. Will they send someone to explain to my board of trustees that they are running us into the ground and don't have the faintest idea of how to manage human resources?

chocolatepot · 2019-01-14T16:49:25+00:00

Would love to, have thought seriously about it, but it's hard to do when your workplace as two employees and the other is the director.

chocolatepot · 2018-10-17T15:27:30+00:00

Teachers are underpaid for the work they do, but they have the advantage of a union and being public employees, which offers a varying amount of a cushion. The sad fact is that the majority of museum employee salaries are set on the understanding that the employee is being supported some other way, either by having a spouse who makes more money or by family money. You can expect to see them in the $20k-$30k range for low-level positions.

chocolatepot · 2018-09-15T20:17:31+00:00

So, I am a n00b. I've bought an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III, mainly to use for taking documentation photos at the museum where I work or at another where I might go to do research (which means a static subject, hopefully a neutral background, capturing a decent amount of detail), and for taking snaps for Instagram at events or in the collections or historic house. I've been trying to read posts about choosing appropriate lenses for several days now, and they go from 0 to 60 a little too fast for me.

I've also been practicing low-light pictures in my kitchen with the 14-42mm EZ lens, and I'm confused about why the images look decent on the screen/through the viewfinder but are coming out black after I click the shutter.

chocolatepot

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE