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Ask any curator to summarise the contents of his or her collection and you’re unlikely to receive an unqualified answer. The demands of the job are now so multifarious that allowing time to acquire detailed collections knowledge – let alone record it for posterity – is invariably regarded as a luxury.

Then there’s the question of knowledge transfer – and the fear that, without systematic succession planning, any in-depth understanding that specialists do manage to accumulate during their tenures will be “lost” when they retire.

It was this concern that inspired the Museums Association’s (MA) Monument Fellowship programme, which pays retired curators to return to work to enrich their records by formally documenting their insights.

Individual institutions are increasingly conscious of this issue, too. Over the past two years, the Natural History Museum (NHM) has been collaborating with Kingston University on a project entitled Museum Lives. This has involved interviewing dozens of retired (and soon-to-retire) NHM staff for oral histories intended to capture their subject-specialist and institutional knowledge.

As the MA prepares to debate these and related issues at a one-day conference later this month, six senior curators share some of their acquired expertise.

James Morrison is a freelance journalist.

The Knowledge, a Museums Association one-day conference, is on 19 January in London. For further information, click here

Gloria Clifton has experienced first-hand the difficulties that can arise when collections knowledge is not routinely recorded by museums.

The 61-year-old curatorial head of the Greenwich Royal Observatory recalls the problems she experienced decoding the rationale her predecessors had for their interpretations of certain objects when she first joined in 1992.

“The museum had just gone through some big changes. I was aware of the problem of knowledge being lost,” she explains. “You weren’t sure why certain things had been done, or why particular objects were on display while others weren’t. I had to pick up the phone once or twice.”

She also successfully debunked some ingrained institutional myths: “We have an instrument known as Drake’s Dial, but there’s no evidence it belonged to Sir Francis Drake, other than the personal fancy of the person who donated it to William IV.”

Clifton believes the widespread introduction of computer-based cataloguing has introduced a “discipline” into curating that makes significant gaps and errors in knowledge less likely to arise in the future.

But she sees computers as a double-edged sword: “Some people think they can look everything up on the internet, but not everything’s on it – some information is still sitting in dusty files.”

When Brian Rosen left the Natural History Museum in 2002, aged 60, so too did an encyclopaedic knowledge of its palaeontology collection.

While the museum’s sprawling catalogue contains masses of taxonomic information, the enormity of its holdings makes it impossible for all but essential details to be inputted on a daily basis.

Rosen feels curators and researchers often internalise a level of added value that, if recorded, might greatly enhance our collections knowledge.

“The most obvious thing is the intimate knowledge one builds up of specimens, collections and species,” he says. “This is so intricate it escapes general recognition. Much of it never goes directly into publications, but feeds into one’s work imperceptibly over the years.”

In his 35-year tenure, beginning with his recruitment in 1972 as a senior scientific officer, Rosen witnessed seismic changes in museum culture.

“It used to be stuffy and hierarchical – preoccupied with duties and protocols, with little acknowledgement of the role of creativity in good science,” he remembers.
 
“People who didn’t fit neatly found it slow to gain recognition and sometimes left in frustration. Most of the above has faded away over time or been changed by government demands and other factors. The museum is more lively, and much stronger on outreach.”

If Martin Wyld is certain of taking any knowledge with him when he retires from the National Gallery, it’s the institutional “folk memory” he imbibed from the characters working there when he joined in the mid-1960s.

Having just turned 65, the gallery’s director of conservation is nearing retirement, but he’s confident the bulk of his collections knowledge has already been absorbed by his anointed successor, Larry Keith, with whom he has worked closely for 18 years.

What Keith doesn’t possess is the mine of anecdotal information about the gallery’s pre-war history that Wyld acquired as a trainee restorer – much of it never formally recorded.

“What I know that other people don’t are folk memories of the 1930s, 40s and 50s,” he teases. “I know gossip about staff and trustees and stories connected with acquisitions I don’t think I’d better share.”

Among Wyld’s early colleagues are some whose names have since entered the realms of museum legend. They included consultant conservator Helmut Ruhemann, who worked for the National Gallery from 1934, and the gallery’s then director, the late Martin Davies.

“When I started here, the gallery staff was very small,” Wyld recalls. “Everybody knew everybody. Many of today’s departments – things like communications and information systems – simply didn’t exist then.”

When Lorraine Cornish finally decides the level of bureaucracy involved in her job has tipped the scales from the “50-50 balance” she’s prepared to tolerate between admin and hands-on curating, she’ll leave the Natural History Museum (NHM) bereft of the world’s leading expert on archaeopteryx.

At a positively youthful 50, Cornish, whose analysis of the 150-million-year-old bird’s feathers refuted a 1983 paper claiming it was a fake, has no immediate plans to retire.

But so conscious is the museum of the value of her specialist expertise that Kingston University researchers have already interviewed her three times for the Museum Lives project.

“They’re recording information that wouldn’t be written in a technical report, but adds context,” she says. “My work on archaeopteryx is documented, but there’s no information about me. One day that might be important”.

During the past 30 years, she has witnessed the NHM change from being a “very civil service”, with swathes of time spent “gluing and sticking” to repair damage done by over-zealous Victorian curators, to the point where replica fossils can be made without laying a finger on the originals.

“We used to take moulds from the fossils,” Cornish explains. “Nowadays, we put specimens through scanners, record the data, and use lasers to build three-dimensional replicas.”

Dominique Collon’s association with the British Museum (BM)stretches back 48 years – beginning with an invitation from the then head of the department of Western Asiatic antiquities to spend a week there as a volunteer.

By the time she retired, on her 65th birthday in May 2005, she was assistant keeper of that collection, and the world’s leading expert on cylinder seals – decorated stones used as “receipts” in ancient Near East transactions.

Since then, she’s maintained her links with the museum, returning to the unpaid status she first enjoyed in 1961, albeit as a consultant.

During her career, Collon developed such an extensive appreciation of the museum’s seals that conveying it wholesale to her successors would be impractical: “Curators have masses in their heads that can’t be quantified. My brains are picked each time I go to the BM.”

Only recently has she had time to interpret certain items: “After retiring, I sorted trays of seal impressions that had never been sorted. I found a set of plaster casts of a large octagonal bead inscribed in Luwian (Hittite) hieroglyphs. It’s otherwise unknown, and the impressions of its eight sides are now being published by a colleague.”

York’s National Railway Museum would have lost numerous nuggets of specialist knowledge had recently retired librarian Phil Atkins not been paid to return and write them down after leaving his post.

Two years ago, 63-year-old Atkins was among the first batch of seven outgoing curators to receive a Monument Fellowship from the Museums Association.

Over the following 12 months, he returned to the museum twice a week to document collections-related information he hadn’t had time to systematically record while working there officially.

What emerged from this 100-hour project was a series of narratives weaving together disparate strands drawn from the museum’s catalogue. Atkins says of the fellowship’s virtues: “Some of the details I know about these items and their collectors would otherwise have gone with me. I was the only person around who could say how some objects were acquired.”

Many of the details he teased out while compiling his “mighty screed” are esoteric in the extreme – but would delight train enthusiasts.

For example, by poring over the collection at his leisure, he discovered that three Southern Railway express locomotives were repainted by the company, each in a different shade of green, at several points between 1924 and 1946.