Essay on “Curator and His Responsibilities”
Curator is a person whose job is to be in charge of the objects or works of art in a museum or an art gallery. He/she is the most important person in a museum. Running a museum requires teamwork. The curator has a team of workers. However, the ultimate responsibility lies upon the curator.
The curator should be a person having different types of qualities and talents. Fie should be a scholarly person, should have the ability to work hard, completely dedicated towards his work as well as knowledge about museum and administrative works. A curator’s job is very difficult. He has to involve himself in many activities like collecting different objects, selection, exhibition of the objects, dealing with the staff, dealing with the public coming to the museum and taking appropriate steps relating to the safety of the museum objects.
The curator has to perform the documentation of the objects. This means that each object has to be registered in the museum. Details of the object such as its description and dimension, its weight and price paid, date of acquiring the object and location of the object in the museum is to be maintained by the curator. This helps in finding a particular object easily in the museum.
Another duty of the curator is to undertake research work in the museum and then to get it published in the form of pamphlets, posters and picture postcards of the museum. Guiding the visitors visiting the museum is a very common duty of the curator. He also looks after the overall administrative responsibilities of the museum. He even has to take care of the storage of the objects, so that the objects do not deteriorate. He even maintains very high security of the museum and makes sure that there is no damage or theft in the museum.
One of the very important functions of the curator is to put up an exhibition in the museum. He has to take care of the presentation of the objects and see that they are displayed and exhibited in the museum. Thus, the curator plays an important role in exhibition because he has to take different measures ranging from taking objects on loan from other museums to making proper arrangements of bringing objects from different parts of the country.
However, if the museum is small there is a great challenge to the curator because there is less staff. In case of bigger museum, the responsibilities are divided. Thus, the job of the curator is not an easy but a challenging and difficult one.
