How to describe an exhibit position?

[jehaun]

Dear all,

I hope to draw on your expertise, as I am an archivist, rather than a museum specialist by training. I am the lone archivist for an East Coast boarding school that is currently celebrating its bicentennial. As the archivist, I am currently responsible for all archival aquisitions, processing, reference, and display activities for our manuscript collections, which include documents, school, publications, photographs, different recording formats, and a small number of artifacts. I typically do one modest exhibit here in the library each spring, focused on some aspect of school history. (When you wear all the hats in a position, everything gets only a sliver of your time!) Thanks to a generous gift from a donor, we are looking at physical renovation of our space as well as expansion of our display and education programming. We would like to create a new position for someone who would:

- Be responsible for developing historical displays all over campus, year-round, both permanent and rotating, all related to the history of our school. (As the administrator backing this says, "We want something historical on every major wall in every building on campus!") Because of preservation concerns in such a wide variety of spaces that are not actually designed for museum-quality display, we're currently thinking that the focus would be on creating mostly two-dimensial exhibits using informational text and facsimiles rather than originals more often than not. The person would need to do the research, write the text for the exhibit and then coordinate the physical display.

- We would also like the person to be responsible for creating virtual exhibits of materials, including historical photographs, documents and multimedia, to create online accessibility, since our alumni community is distributed around the world.

Our preliminary thoughts are that we would ideally like someone with a background in museum studies, archives or history, and experience in both physical and virtual display. Since none of us here in the library are museum professionals, we've been a bit stymied as to how to describe the position accurately. We also have been having trouble finding a position similar to what we're thinking of described at other institutions. One administrator keeps calling it a "curator" position, but since the position we are thinking of wouldn't involve collection development, we think that may be misleading.

Is anyone able to suggest a good way to describe what we're looking for in appropriate language for museum professionals? Do you think we may be asking too much to ask for both physical and digital expertise?

Thanks for any help you can give me on this. It's exciting to have the funding to support the idea, if we can only make it work!

Jacqi Haun
Archivist
The Lawrenceville School