What is a curator?
A curator is the person responsible for a specific collection in a cultural heritage institution (such as an archive, a library, or a museum). The curator specializes in a subject relevant to the collection and is deeply informed about the content it contains. This person is responsible for selecting material to go into the collection; writing documentation, reports, and catalogs that describe the material; overseeing its maintenance and preservation; and often performing other activities such as publishing research on the collection, arranging to meet with researchers who want to use or learn about the collection, and other activities. A curator may be a librarian, an archivist, a historian, or hold an advanced degree in any of a number of subjects. Some curators are all of the above!
There are multiple curators at the Cushing Memorial Library. To find out more about them, see our “What We Do” page.