It’s Ask a Curator Day!

The Natural History Museum, London. Michael D. Beckwith

What if you had the chance to ask the people behind the scenes at your favorite museum anything you wanted? What would you want to know?

You’ll have the chance to do just that on September 17th, 2014; Ask A Curator Day. Initiated on Twitter in 2010, it’s now spread to additional social media streams. This year, 701 Museums* will be participating, from 43 different countries. The event is coordinated by Mar Dixon, a social media and audience development consultant.

The museums participating aren’t just science museums; there are history museums, art museums, a video game museum, and a Cricket museum. (Alas, the New Zealand Cricket Museum will be talking about the sport, not insects.)

Royalty will be in on the action; Buckingham Palace and the Royal Collection, as well as the Palace of Versailles, will be available for questions.

Even the British Monarchy is participating!

Sierra Leone’s Train Museum will be participating, even in the middle of the Ebola outbreak. From that curator, via Dixon: “if people can’t get here, I still want to get my voice out….We need to let people know they can still contact us. We need to let people know the collection is OK and the history of what is happening will be documented.”

How do you participate?

You’ll need a Twitter or Facebook account to ask a question, but anyone can “listen” in by following the hashtag #AskACurator.

What should you ask about?

Anything is fair game for questions!  Ask about the history of naked sculptures and human bodybuilders, or how to use microbrew beer to fund butterfly research.  How many curators does it take to change a lightbulb in a historic house? Why is a giant shrimp on a bicycle in your museum? Why are the Life Collections at Oxford NHM mostly dead stuff?

I’m personally looking forward to quizzing curators of some of the great biological collections of the world. For example, the National History Museum London is where this fairly nondescript beetle lives:

Specimen collected by Charles Darwin in Tierra del Fuego in December 1832. Natural History Museum, Coleoptera

What makes this little brown beetle special? It was collected by a 22 yr-old Charles Darwin in Tierra del Fuego in December 1832, when it flew to his oil lamp as he camped at the tip of South America.

There are many historic insects in the NHM collection, including a weevil collected by Lewis Leakey, and Nabokov’s butterfly collection. I would be a complete nervous wreck if I worked in these collections. That beetle is a piece of both biological and human history.

What’s it like to have that responsibility? What’s the oldest thing in the collection? How many kinds of beetles are there?

Ask A Curator Day is a great opportunity to ask all the things you’ve wondered since you were a kid. Why can’t we touch it? Why is the Mona Lisa so small? Were medieval clowns terrifying too, or is that just a recent thing?

The curators I know are thrilled to discuss their passion. Don’t be afraid to ask! Remember that while Wednesday is official “Ask a Curator Day” you can ask questions any day. And mark your calendars for January 21st 2015, for #MuseumSelfie day!

**Note: More Museums signed up since this was published! Total count now at 701. Updated 9/17/2014 7:00am

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