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Management, professionalism and the archival functions of museums
The InternationalJournal
of Museum Management and Curatorship (1989), 8,131-135
Editorial Management, Professionalism and the Archival Functions of Museums
In the course of the last two Editorials in this Journal (December 1988 and March 1989), the roles of the scholar-curator have been explored, but the increasingly abrasive policies being adopted by national governments and governing bodies recommend a closer examination of management and professionalism in museums. The present issue of this Journal includes four interlinked contributions, all of which throw valuable light on the problems. Professor Carol Kovach, in ‘Strategic Management for Museums’, provides from the viewpoint of the academic department of business studies a critical overview of the application of strategic management theory to museums, and the limitations inherent when ideas developed for the market-place are translated to the non-profit environment. Museum management today is increasingly bedevilled by partially understood management theory being applied crudely to institutions whose characteristics are not those of the market-place, and the interventions of those with little understanding of museum collections and less sympathy for their intellectual foundations. Alf Hatton stands back and takes a critical look at a number of the statements made by Sir John Hale and his committee in their report, Museum Professional Training and Career Structure, published by the Museums & Galleries Commission in August 1987 (the ‘Hale Report’), whilst M. Kirby Talley, Jr, provides, with particular reference to the labours of the Rembrandt Commission, a detailed analysis of the place of connoisseurship in the skills of the museum art historian. One of the most substantial articles yet published in this Journal, we believe that the achievement and exercise of connoisseurship, particularly in art museums, is of central importance for curatorship, and that in consequence no excuse is required for its length. Douglas Noble completes his study of turnover among museum directors, its implications for innovation and its impact on organizational effectiveness (for his earlier study see Douglas R. Noble, ‘Turnover Among Museum Directors’, The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 7, 1988, pp. 25-32). In researching his MBA thesis, Noble developed six innovation areas, or categories, and the implementation of them is almost entirely within the field of activities generally covered by management. The sample was not sufficiently large to be able to substantiate wide reaching conclusions, but the review of the data obtained during the research project provides a number of significant insights into current perceptions of the roles of museum managers within the United States of America, and, given their position as market leaders, thereby the role models tending to be imitated elsewhere. Unfortunately, the European admiration for some of the achievements of the United States models rarely extends to a commensurate understanding of the intricate web of checks and balances within the community which allows these techniques to be adopted there and make many of them fundamentally unsuitable within European contexts. Professionalism within the museum context has been in recent years the subject of considerable debate, and although the International Council of Museums (ICOM), in 0260-4779/89/02 0131-05 $03.00 0
1989 Butterworth
&Co
(Publishers)
Ltd
132
Editorial
Article 5 of its Statutes, presumes the existence of the museum profession, there are those such as Wilcomb E. Washburn (‘Professionalizing the Muses’, Museum News, December 1985, pp. 32-35), who doubt whether the diversity of disciplines, knowledge and skills utilized in museums can ever yield a common denominator which identifies the museum professional. These problems have been reviewed by Stephen Weil (‘The Ongoing Pursuit of Professional Status’, Museum News, November/December 1988, pp. 30-34), following his keynote address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Council of Australian Museum Associations, Brisbane, 1987, and he took as a point of departure the definition of a ‘profession’ provided by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: A calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive preparation including instruction in skills and methods as well as in the scientific, historical, or scholarly principles underlying such skills and methods, maintaining by force of organization or concerted opinion high standards of achievement and conduct, and committing its members to continued study and to a kind of work which has for its prime purpose the rendering of a public service. Similarly
The Oxford
English
Dictionary
defines ‘profession’:
The occupation which one professes to be skilled in and to follow. (a) A vocation which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science is used its application to the affairs of others or in the practice of art founded upon Applied Spec. to the three learned professions of divinity, law, and medicine; also the military profession.
in in it. to
Admittedly the ICOM Statutes, in defining the profession in terms of the personnel who have received specialized or academic training, or possess an equivalent practical experience, do not adopt an overwhelmingly inclusive position, and by implication members of other ‘professions’ who follow those professions within the framework of a museum are not automatically considered to be museum professionals. The chartered accountant, for example, working within a museum remains a professional chartered accountant, and few chartered accountants in this situation would prefer to think of themselves as museum professionals instead. The problems arise with respect to the growing body of museum managers and administrators who have received training in neither a discipline cognate to the museum collections and their services, nor an independent discipline which boasts its own professional identity. On the basis of Webster’s and The Oxford English Dictionary the museum professionals are the curators, conservators, registrars and others requiring specialized academic or technical knowledge related to the collections, whilst, for example, the restaurant and museum shop managers are not. Professionalization, as a sociologically identifiable process, is by no means confined to museums, and is not unrelated to the widespread human desire to clamber at least one rung further up the perceived ladder and thus enhanced peer estimation. Museum conservators and registrars have achieved during the course of the last twenty years well-defined group identities within the museum community, and have based their enhanced status on their special skills and direct responsibility for collections. Meanwhile the curators have retained their ‘professional’ status by virtue of their training and practical experience, though reduced in both numbers and influence. Stephen Weil (op. tit) concluded that although the pursuit of professionalism within the museum environment might well prove to be largely illusory, the exercise was very worthwhile because its by-products were positive and extremely important in their own right.
Editorial
133
Increasing standards of achievement and conduct towards the work cannot but be beneficial, but the implication must be that those standards are established by the core responsibilities of the museum, and that any divergence from those standards may constitute a reduction in professionalism, or indeed de-professionalization. Not surprisingly, most curators and other museum staff who have received specialist training view the transfer of responsibility for collections from them to managers and administrators who have not received such training, or whose strengths lie elsewhere, as de f&o de-professionalization. One of the more distressing manifestations of declining standards of literacy has been an increasingly careless use of language and, on occasion, the deliberate misuse of words in order to distract attention away from the substance of what is being proposed. An excellent example of this trend is the indiscriminate adoption of North American management jargon by the ‘museum industry’, and the insertion thereby of yet another level of partial understanding. Strange to relate, management and professionalism, within the management context as well as the outside world, are not synonymous. Nevertheless, professionalism, as a concept, has become increasingly hijacked by management, and the unfortunate truth is that museums are particularly inappropriate places in which to exercise some of the cruder manifestations of fashionable management theory. Ignoring the fundamental difficulties experienced in attempting to reconcile conventional management theory evolved for the market-place with the non-quantifiable dimensions of museum collections and their spiritual resources, the exercise is doing justice to neither. The present author recalls, as Keeper of the Department of Art at the City Museum and Art Gallery of Birmingham, reporting to its governing body c.1975 that ‘maintenance of an undefined status quo cannot be the basis for the management of a department’, but during the last decade only limited progress has been made with respect to defining the core functions of museums and thus the institution’s primary responsibilities. Management is merely a tool, a means to an end; and it cannot be undertaken without clearly defined functional objectives in place and agreed ground-rules as to how those objectives may be achieved. Today, increasing numbers of museums are asking themselves searching questions as to why they exist and what they are doing. J In the United States of America the museum’s mission statement provides the basis for the specific policies adopted by trustees and the executive decisions taken in order to carry them out, and since the museum’s tax status ultimately depends upon the faithfulness with which the trustees discharge the obligations imposed by its mission statement, an effective system of checks and balances thereby comes into play. Indeed, the Courts in the United States of America have been active in recent years to protect the public interest, particularly in respect of controlling the deaccessioning of collections and unwise financial speculation by trustees. No such protection is enjoyed by museums in the United Kingdom, though the new Museums Registration Scheme currently being established by the Museums & Galleries Commission demands an unequivocal collections management statement, formally approved by the governing body or owner of the collections, as a prerequisite for registration. Formal mission statements for museums are still considerable rarities in much of Europe and even the ‘status quo’ remains undefined. Consequently the temptation to introduce ‘pure’ management, untrammelled by the traditions of curatorship or defined institutional strategic objectives, and simultaneously to move the goal posts whenever convenient, is considerable and not resisted by all governments. An Alice in Wonderland situation is created by cynical manipulation of not only the core functions of the museum but also the very words employed for their description. Sound
134
Editorial
museum management can be based only on museum professionalism and a clear understanding of what constitutes the intellectual foundations of the institution. Many of the ideas and intellectual concepts embodied in museum collections are neither simple nor easy to comprehend, and to pretend otherwise is deception of a particularly silly and potentially vicious kind. The assembly of museum collections involves the exercise of judgement-of whether to collect a particular class of material-and of choice-which specific example to select for inclusion. Those decisions are taken within a rational intellectual environment, just like the decisions which have to be taken day-to-day as to which items collected are to be conserved and to what standards, and what interpretation is to be made of them. Thus, if elitism is the exercise of informed discrimination, museums are bastions of elitism. It requires a minimum of three years hard work to gain the very limited wisdom which is represented by a basic university degree, and yet the archaeologist, botanist, art historian or other graduate emerging from a first degree course is then able to make only very limited use of museum collections. That is a criticism of neither the education provided, nor the technical skills developed by the individual graduate, nor the museum collections available for use, but a statement of fact. Indeed, that is why museum collections are assembled and researched. The community has in the museum movement since the late 18th century, recognized the importance to it of the information embodied in objects. Consequently it has encouraged the formation, in accordance with rational criteria, of collections of objects and the gathering of knowledge concerning them and their contexts. The entertainment, or for that matter the education, of outsiders, is desirable, but purely incidental. Thus Alf Hatton is entirely correct when, in the context of the ‘Hale Report’, he suggests that some of the present difficulties may be due to there being simply far too many museums. The vast expansion of heterogeneous organizations calling themselves museums, but more and more distant from the intellectual and functional basis outlined above, encourages more than just an exercise in creative semantics. Of central concern are the fundamental questions being asked as to the extent to which museums should change in response to changes in society. However, formulated in these terms, the issue is already partially prejudged in that it is assumed that the museum has no option but to change in response to changes in society and the only question is by how much? On the other hand there is a growing body of opinion which sees considerable virtue in the idea of the museum as the custodian of objects which do not themselves change, and thus an institution which provides for the benefit of the community a fulcrum for the increasingly frenetic oscillations of cultural theory. The value of this role is highlighted by the evident reluctance of many today to tackle intellectual challenges, and the suspicion that all too much trendy anti-elitism is merely an excuse for intellectual sloth. Can, or should, everything which is intellectually taxing in this world be reduced to pap? The perception of museums as elitist-‘closing their doors to those who do not have the necessary foreknowledge to make good use of a museum or gallery visit’ (‘Hale Report’)-reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of the function of museum collections within the intellectual life of the community and an indication of what highly patronizing cliques of self-appointed arbiters consider will suffice for the rest. The worship of superficiality and toleration of intellectual sloth can never be accepted as virtues, and they are the antithesis of museums as storehouses of knowledge as well as storehouses of objects. Indeed, the slaughter of sacred cows currently in fashion invites careful scrutiny of the intellectual justification for the slaughter, and of the motives of the slaughterers, as well as of the presumed inadequacies of the sacred cows themselves.
Editorial
135
The key to the solution of the current confusion and crisis of funding lies in the clear separation of the core, archival functions of museums from the wide range of highly desirable but non-core activities with which they have become increasingly associated. Those archival core functions are to collect objects and knowledge about them, conserve those objects for posterity and research them, and make available to the community both the objects and the accumulated knowledge. Various museums achieve different balances between archival core functions and supplementary activities, though the balance in any particular museum today does not necessarily reflect faithfully the archival and intellectual significance of its collections to the community it serves. On the other hand it can be argued that it is the significance of those collections to the community and the world at large which should establish the scale of resources allocated to it, rather than the attractions of the supplementary activities. Thus the museum with collections of major items of national or international importance should be able to expect to receive, in relative terms, a higher proportion of the resources set aside by the community for museum purposes than another museum with exciting educational activities and a vigorous programme of temporary exhibitions, but negligible permanent collections. In other words, where the resources available to the community are limited, the core funding should be directed almost entirely at the archival functions of conservation, research and simple display of collections, whilst the funding of subsidiary activities should be separately budgeted and, if necessary, independently generated. By this means the funding bodies have the obligation to differentiate not only between the two budgets but also between the very different criteria governing the assessment of their respective operations. Coherent management of archival core functions, and tough quality control of the conservation and research work being undertaken, becomes possible only when a budgetary separation is achieved between them and the subsidiary activities for which so very different criteria apply. Both require professionalism, but coupled with different management skills, and just as the educator and the exhibition organizer have to serve their respective publics effectively in order to justify their activities, the scholar-curator, in studying objects and accumulating knowledge in depth concerning them and their context, is not absolved from undertaking that work efficiently, within a structured environment.
of Museum Management and Curatorship (1989), 8,131-135
Editorial Management, Professionalism and the Archival Functions of Museums
In the course of the last two Editorials in this Journal (December 1988 and March 1989), the roles of the scholar-curator have been explored, but the increasingly abrasive policies being adopted by national governments and governing bodies recommend a closer examination of management and professionalism in museums. The present issue of this Journal includes four interlinked contributions, all of which throw valuable light on the problems. Professor Carol Kovach, in ‘Strategic Management for Museums’, provides from the viewpoint of the academic department of business studies a critical overview of the application of strategic management theory to museums, and the limitations inherent when ideas developed for the market-place are translated to the non-profit environment. Museum management today is increasingly bedevilled by partially understood management theory being applied crudely to institutions whose characteristics are not those of the market-place, and the interventions of those with little understanding of museum collections and less sympathy for their intellectual foundations. Alf Hatton stands back and takes a critical look at a number of the statements made by Sir John Hale and his committee in their report, Museum Professional Training and Career Structure, published by the Museums & Galleries Commission in August 1987 (the ‘Hale Report’), whilst M. Kirby Talley, Jr, provides, with particular reference to the labours of the Rembrandt Commission, a detailed analysis of the place of connoisseurship in the skills of the museum art historian. One of the most substantial articles yet published in this Journal, we believe that the achievement and exercise of connoisseurship, particularly in art museums, is of central importance for curatorship, and that in consequence no excuse is required for its length. Douglas Noble completes his study of turnover among museum directors, its implications for innovation and its impact on organizational effectiveness (for his earlier study see Douglas R. Noble, ‘Turnover Among Museum Directors’, The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship, 7, 1988, pp. 25-32). In researching his MBA thesis, Noble developed six innovation areas, or categories, and the implementation of them is almost entirely within the field of activities generally covered by management. The sample was not sufficiently large to be able to substantiate wide reaching conclusions, but the review of the data obtained during the research project provides a number of significant insights into current perceptions of the roles of museum managers within the United States of America, and, given their position as market leaders, thereby the role models tending to be imitated elsewhere. Unfortunately, the European admiration for some of the achievements of the United States models rarely extends to a commensurate understanding of the intricate web of checks and balances within the community which allows these techniques to be adopted there and make many of them fundamentally unsuitable within European contexts. Professionalism within the museum context has been in recent years the subject of considerable debate, and although the International Council of Museums (ICOM), in 0260-4779/89/02 0131-05 $03.00 0
1989 Butterworth
&Co
(Publishers)
Ltd
132
Editorial
Article 5 of its Statutes, presumes the existence of the museum profession, there are those such as Wilcomb E. Washburn (‘Professionalizing the Muses’, Museum News, December 1985, pp. 32-35), who doubt whether the diversity of disciplines, knowledge and skills utilized in museums can ever yield a common denominator which identifies the museum professional. These problems have been reviewed by Stephen Weil (‘The Ongoing Pursuit of Professional Status’, Museum News, November/December 1988, pp. 30-34), following his keynote address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Council of Australian Museum Associations, Brisbane, 1987, and he took as a point of departure the definition of a ‘profession’ provided by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: A calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive preparation including instruction in skills and methods as well as in the scientific, historical, or scholarly principles underlying such skills and methods, maintaining by force of organization or concerted opinion high standards of achievement and conduct, and committing its members to continued study and to a kind of work which has for its prime purpose the rendering of a public service. Similarly
The Oxford
English
Dictionary
defines ‘profession’:
The occupation which one professes to be skilled in and to follow. (a) A vocation which a professed knowledge of some department of learning or science is used its application to the affairs of others or in the practice of art founded upon Applied Spec. to the three learned professions of divinity, law, and medicine; also the military profession.
in in it. to
Admittedly the ICOM Statutes, in defining the profession in terms of the personnel who have received specialized or academic training, or possess an equivalent practical experience, do not adopt an overwhelmingly inclusive position, and by implication members of other ‘professions’ who follow those professions within the framework of a museum are not automatically considered to be museum professionals. The chartered accountant, for example, working within a museum remains a professional chartered accountant, and few chartered accountants in this situation would prefer to think of themselves as museum professionals instead. The problems arise with respect to the growing body of museum managers and administrators who have received training in neither a discipline cognate to the museum collections and their services, nor an independent discipline which boasts its own professional identity. On the basis of Webster’s and The Oxford English Dictionary the museum professionals are the curators, conservators, registrars and others requiring specialized academic or technical knowledge related to the collections, whilst, for example, the restaurant and museum shop managers are not. Professionalization, as a sociologically identifiable process, is by no means confined to museums, and is not unrelated to the widespread human desire to clamber at least one rung further up the perceived ladder and thus enhanced peer estimation. Museum conservators and registrars have achieved during the course of the last twenty years well-defined group identities within the museum community, and have based their enhanced status on their special skills and direct responsibility for collections. Meanwhile the curators have retained their ‘professional’ status by virtue of their training and practical experience, though reduced in both numbers and influence. Stephen Weil (op. tit) concluded that although the pursuit of professionalism within the museum environment might well prove to be largely illusory, the exercise was very worthwhile because its by-products were positive and extremely important in their own right.
Editorial
133
Increasing standards of achievement and conduct towards the work cannot but be beneficial, but the implication must be that those standards are established by the core responsibilities of the museum, and that any divergence from those standards may constitute a reduction in professionalism, or indeed de-professionalization. Not surprisingly, most curators and other museum staff who have received specialist training view the transfer of responsibility for collections from them to managers and administrators who have not received such training, or whose strengths lie elsewhere, as de f&o de-professionalization. One of the more distressing manifestations of declining standards of literacy has been an increasingly careless use of language and, on occasion, the deliberate misuse of words in order to distract attention away from the substance of what is being proposed. An excellent example of this trend is the indiscriminate adoption of North American management jargon by the ‘museum industry’, and the insertion thereby of yet another level of partial understanding. Strange to relate, management and professionalism, within the management context as well as the outside world, are not synonymous. Nevertheless, professionalism, as a concept, has become increasingly hijacked by management, and the unfortunate truth is that museums are particularly inappropriate places in which to exercise some of the cruder manifestations of fashionable management theory. Ignoring the fundamental difficulties experienced in attempting to reconcile conventional management theory evolved for the market-place with the non-quantifiable dimensions of museum collections and their spiritual resources, the exercise is doing justice to neither. The present author recalls, as Keeper of the Department of Art at the City Museum and Art Gallery of Birmingham, reporting to its governing body c.1975 that ‘maintenance of an undefined status quo cannot be the basis for the management of a department’, but during the last decade only limited progress has been made with respect to defining the core functions of museums and thus the institution’s primary responsibilities. Management is merely a tool, a means to an end; and it cannot be undertaken without clearly defined functional objectives in place and agreed ground-rules as to how those objectives may be achieved. Today, increasing numbers of museums are asking themselves searching questions as to why they exist and what they are doing. J In the United States of America the museum’s mission statement provides the basis for the specific policies adopted by trustees and the executive decisions taken in order to carry them out, and since the museum’s tax status ultimately depends upon the faithfulness with which the trustees discharge the obligations imposed by its mission statement, an effective system of checks and balances thereby comes into play. Indeed, the Courts in the United States of America have been active in recent years to protect the public interest, particularly in respect of controlling the deaccessioning of collections and unwise financial speculation by trustees. No such protection is enjoyed by museums in the United Kingdom, though the new Museums Registration Scheme currently being established by the Museums & Galleries Commission demands an unequivocal collections management statement, formally approved by the governing body or owner of the collections, as a prerequisite for registration. Formal mission statements for museums are still considerable rarities in much of Europe and even the ‘status quo’ remains undefined. Consequently the temptation to introduce ‘pure’ management, untrammelled by the traditions of curatorship or defined institutional strategic objectives, and simultaneously to move the goal posts whenever convenient, is considerable and not resisted by all governments. An Alice in Wonderland situation is created by cynical manipulation of not only the core functions of the museum but also the very words employed for their description. Sound
134
Editorial
museum management can be based only on museum professionalism and a clear understanding of what constitutes the intellectual foundations of the institution. Many of the ideas and intellectual concepts embodied in museum collections are neither simple nor easy to comprehend, and to pretend otherwise is deception of a particularly silly and potentially vicious kind. The assembly of museum collections involves the exercise of judgement-of whether to collect a particular class of material-and of choice-which specific example to select for inclusion. Those decisions are taken within a rational intellectual environment, just like the decisions which have to be taken day-to-day as to which items collected are to be conserved and to what standards, and what interpretation is to be made of them. Thus, if elitism is the exercise of informed discrimination, museums are bastions of elitism. It requires a minimum of three years hard work to gain the very limited wisdom which is represented by a basic university degree, and yet the archaeologist, botanist, art historian or other graduate emerging from a first degree course is then able to make only very limited use of museum collections. That is a criticism of neither the education provided, nor the technical skills developed by the individual graduate, nor the museum collections available for use, but a statement of fact. Indeed, that is why museum collections are assembled and researched. The community has in the museum movement since the late 18th century, recognized the importance to it of the information embodied in objects. Consequently it has encouraged the formation, in accordance with rational criteria, of collections of objects and the gathering of knowledge concerning them and their contexts. The entertainment, or for that matter the education, of outsiders, is desirable, but purely incidental. Thus Alf Hatton is entirely correct when, in the context of the ‘Hale Report’, he suggests that some of the present difficulties may be due to there being simply far too many museums. The vast expansion of heterogeneous organizations calling themselves museums, but more and more distant from the intellectual and functional basis outlined above, encourages more than just an exercise in creative semantics. Of central concern are the fundamental questions being asked as to the extent to which museums should change in response to changes in society. However, formulated in these terms, the issue is already partially prejudged in that it is assumed that the museum has no option but to change in response to changes in society and the only question is by how much? On the other hand there is a growing body of opinion which sees considerable virtue in the idea of the museum as the custodian of objects which do not themselves change, and thus an institution which provides for the benefit of the community a fulcrum for the increasingly frenetic oscillations of cultural theory. The value of this role is highlighted by the evident reluctance of many today to tackle intellectual challenges, and the suspicion that all too much trendy anti-elitism is merely an excuse for intellectual sloth. Can, or should, everything which is intellectually taxing in this world be reduced to pap? The perception of museums as elitist-‘closing their doors to those who do not have the necessary foreknowledge to make good use of a museum or gallery visit’ (‘Hale Report’)-reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of the function of museum collections within the intellectual life of the community and an indication of what highly patronizing cliques of self-appointed arbiters consider will suffice for the rest. The worship of superficiality and toleration of intellectual sloth can never be accepted as virtues, and they are the antithesis of museums as storehouses of knowledge as well as storehouses of objects. Indeed, the slaughter of sacred cows currently in fashion invites careful scrutiny of the intellectual justification for the slaughter, and of the motives of the slaughterers, as well as of the presumed inadequacies of the sacred cows themselves.
Editorial
135
The key to the solution of the current confusion and crisis of funding lies in the clear separation of the core, archival functions of museums from the wide range of highly desirable but non-core activities with which they have become increasingly associated. Those archival core functions are to collect objects and knowledge about them, conserve those objects for posterity and research them, and make available to the community both the objects and the accumulated knowledge. Various museums achieve different balances between archival core functions and supplementary activities, though the balance in any particular museum today does not necessarily reflect faithfully the archival and intellectual significance of its collections to the community it serves. On the other hand it can be argued that it is the significance of those collections to the community and the world at large which should establish the scale of resources allocated to it, rather than the attractions of the supplementary activities. Thus the museum with collections of major items of national or international importance should be able to expect to receive, in relative terms, a higher proportion of the resources set aside by the community for museum purposes than another museum with exciting educational activities and a vigorous programme of temporary exhibitions, but negligible permanent collections. In other words, where the resources available to the community are limited, the core funding should be directed almost entirely at the archival functions of conservation, research and simple display of collections, whilst the funding of subsidiary activities should be separately budgeted and, if necessary, independently generated. By this means the funding bodies have the obligation to differentiate not only between the two budgets but also between the very different criteria governing the assessment of their respective operations. Coherent management of archival core functions, and tough quality control of the conservation and research work being undertaken, becomes possible only when a budgetary separation is achieved between them and the subsidiary activities for which so very different criteria apply. Both require professionalism, but coupled with different management skills, and just as the educator and the exhibition organizer have to serve their respective publics effectively in order to justify their activities, the scholar-curator, in studying objects and accumulating knowledge in depth concerning them and their context, is not absolved from undertaking that work efficiently, within a structured environment.