The placement, care, and display of artifacts or documents held by a museum are the responsibility of museum technicians, who work alongside archivists and curators. She could do anything from manual labor to detail-oriented analysis to educational outreach and fundraising. Museum technicians are usually distinguished from curators and archivists by their more technical expertise. They work primarily outside of the public sphere, focusing on the museum’s artifacts.
Depending on the level of museum technician, the tasks she performs can be simple and menial, or they can be detailed and complex. She serves as the museum’s support staff, assisting curators with their responsibilities and ensuring that the museum runs smoothly. A museum technician is an important part of a museum’s operation, and given the role’s highly specialized nature and the specialized protocols in place for most museums, it can be exhausting work.
A museum technician assists with the most basic tasks that need to be completed around a museum. A museum technician, for example, may be responsible for janitorial and custodial duties in the vicinity of fragile artifacts or displays. Because most exhibits are delicate, they can’t be cleaned as easily as a carpet or an office building. Instead, such cleaning necessitates great care and attention, as well as a thorough understanding of the artifacts.
Senior technicians and curators may use more advanced technicians as direct support staff. She may be asked to retrieve or store specimens, assist in the cataloging of records and artifacts, clean or store specimens carefully, or prepare them for use by a more advanced technician or curator in this context. She could also work in a secretarial or educational capacity, preparing documents for public distribution, writing correspondence, and providing tours of the museum’s exhibits.
An intermediate museum technician may also choose to work in a highly specialized area of research. In this case, she is likely to stay in that field for the rest of her career, as the skills she has acquired are extremely specific. For example, she might learn how to restore a specific type of artifact, such as ceramic bowls, and then focus her work on all ceramic bowls in the museum’s collection. Once enough skill has been acquired, choosing a focus like this is usually a path to becoming an advanced museum technician.
Advanced technicians assist in the development of new technologies in their field of expertise. For example, a ceramic bowl specialist may no longer simply restore known types of bowls using pre-existing techniques; she may now work on developing new techniques to improve bowl restoration or adapting older techniques to a new type of bowl. This level of museum technician is responsible for a lot of the growth in the field of restoration and storage, and it can be a lucrative career for those who have the determination to get this far.