Assistant to the Curator

Save to Favorites

Volunteers will assist in the reorganization of the Museum's collections. Volunteers will help work on inventorying, cateloging, and/or accessioning the 35,000 artifacts in the Museum's collections.

This cateloging process is part of an assessment programs the Museum is undertaking in order to achieve national accreditation with the American Alliance of Museums.

Benefits: This project provides a perfect opportunity to develop a variety of skills related to museum, archival, and library work such as gaining experience with cataloging and inventories. Specifically volunteers will learn about artifact handling, condition reporting, photographing, and researching artifacts. This is a great way for people interested in museum work to get hands-on experience working in Collections on a major project to learn how artifacts are acquired, recorded, and stored. Volunteers new to the museum field will increase their understanding of how a museum operates and the important role that the Collections department plays. Volunteers with past experience in the museum field will gain a deeper understanding of the importance of record-keeping for museums. Volunteers will also gain extensive experience working with electronic cataloging databases, like PastPerfect.

Individual volunteers will work with the collections staff and be assigned to catalogue a smaller grouping of objects that are part of the museum's larger collection. Some volunteers will handle objects and record detailed information regarding the size, shape, and condition of each object into an electronic database. Other volunteers will research the objects to find out more information about them and how they will fit within the museum collection. Volunteers will also help to organize and arrange the collections. When a volunteer finishes with one grouping, if they are interested in continuing their time at the Wright they can be assigned to another grouping.

Past experience volunteering or working in libraries, archives, or museums would be beneficial. Experience working with electronic databases, cataloging, or performing inventories would also be beneficial to the position. College or university-course work in history, African American Studies, archaeology, anthropology, communication or media studies, and related fields would give individuals a good foundation for the research work. Volunteers must be conscientious, detail-orientated, patient, thorough, have good organizational skills, and be capable of carefully and respectfully handling fragile artifacts.

Training: Volunteers will receive training in how the Collections department operates and how to catalogue museum objects. This training will cover how the cataloging systems works, how to properly handle objects, what information about each object should be recorded, nomenclature used in condition reports, and how to use an electronic database to log the information.

The hours per week are flexible, but ideally we would like to find volunteers with 10 to 20 hours a week available. Preferably volunteers will work 4 hours a day, 2 days a week for 2 - 3 months.

A resume and a writing sample are required. The Museum conducts a security clearance for all selected Volunteers.