Curators and curating are at the heart of what makes us museums, yet the word curator is freely used in many contexts and with many meanings. As a cross-disciplinary museum consortium, we find that across the University of Cambridge Museums our common recognition of the overriding importance of curation is not necessarily matched by a shared understanding of the role and responsibilities of a curator. Is a curator a source of specialist expertise, a custodian, a content manager, a cultural programmer, a digital archivist, an editor? All these, or none of them? What does the curator of a fossil collection have in common with a contemporary art curator, or the curator of a music festival? Where does community curation, co-curation, digital curation and crowd curation fit?
The Art and Science of Curation
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