21st Century Curatorship An Invitational Meeting of Library, Museum, and Information Professionals
Project Background

Summary

In March 2003, The British Library received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s
Scholarly Communications Program to undertake a project that would seek to define the roles of the curator in the 21st century and to investigate what knowledge, experience, and skills would be required to fulfill these changing roles.

This is a subject of great relevance to many libraries, museums, and archives worldwide. By working with The New York Public Library and by gathering information and ideas from experts from other institutions, The British Library can produce a model or models that could be adaptable elsewhere. Part of the project is expressly concerned with disseminating good practice in this area.

Specific issues of mutual interest to The New York Public Library and The British Library (and other institutions) include the following: the understanding of research needs and trends; how curators interface with scholars; the use of new technologies and techniques to assist research; developments in interpretation; the selection of material for digitisation; succession planning; and curatorial understanding of life-cycle costing in collection development and management.

The purpose of this project is to establish the appropriate sets of skills, roles, work-patterns, outlooks, and relationships that will enable The British Library and other research library, archive, or museum curators to operate successfully in the 21st Century, and to deliver its strategic aim of helping people advance knowledge to enrich lives. Curatorship, in terms of this project, is seen primarily as the interpretation and mediation of the collections.