Curator enters the world's vocabulary

What's in the name "curator" and is it spreading beyond the museum sector?

This topic has been ruminating with me for some time and there seems to be general chit-chat about it in the wider realm: Museums Association, MuseumNext, and more research shows the New York Times saw this trend in 2009!

With me, it started many years ago when Word 97 told me with a red squiggly line that 'curator' was not a word. Well excuse me, but my job title includes curator and therefore I know it; A. exists and B. is spelt correctly. A check at Dictionary.com shows it is in the American dictionary as the person in charge of a museum - not perfect but closer than not existing!!

I have also noticed the word is beginning to creep into more conversations, and I found myself recently speaking to someone at a party that the word 'curator' is actally going to make it big this year. I have done this in recent summers, "Gowalla is totally going to be big this year", "QR codes are going to be everywhere" and "this is Foursquare's year". So my new found party friend will be justified if they pay little attention. Seeing MuseumNext's tweet prompted more thought;



Digg is a news aggregation site which enables the 'crowd' to vote up (dig) or down (bury) stories gathered from across the web. Rather than trust CNN's editors the crowd curated the online news story based on users opinions and an algorithm by Digg. Everybody is a curator, they just don't call themselves that.

Mexico '86 World Cup Sticker book

 Panini stickers, Top Trumps, Barby dolls are all carefully collected, cared for and then shared, interpreted and displayed for a wanting audience. Heck, Google is curating the Internet as quickly as the content providers create the material. 

Current online tools enable individuals to become curators of their own digital content, creating, pinning or plussing what they like at source which is then transferred to their own page, thus adding to the woe of a site like Digg. We choose who to follow on Twitter, then create Lists and share what thrills us. The most obvious Museum of Me is Pinterest, choosing a theme and pinning content to clarify and explain it.

The recently aired BBC Wales show The Exhibitionists offers two people the chance to curate an art show in a gallery at the National Museum of Wales.

As with other areas of leisure the great democratisation has been happening, watch television shows on your terms, control where and what news flow you get to Google Reader, even listen to your phone messages in the order you want. We all need to make more decisions than ever before, Gladwell explains more choice is a good thing, although there is always another way to approach it as Schwartz argues. 

Google Art project enables you to curate your own art show after visiting many hallowed collections wordwide, then share your own curated collection. Are you interested in sharing your curated collection?

How long is it until 'curator' becomes used even more? Will the museum sector wish to distance itself if the word becomes too popular? Or, will museums take advantage of the rise in publicity and the digital link to capitalise and use it to bring management and public on board?