Duties of the Curator & Year end report 2006

Preamble

As in previous years, I am using my job description as the framework of my report. The following elements of the job description are self-explanatory:

"Directs daily operations

"Supervises staff

"Follows NSM procedures and practice as regards McCulloch House

"Prepares & presents annual & operating budgets - monitor and report on same

"Prepare and present monthly stats and program reports as required

"Works positively with both NGO’s and GO’s

"Researches requests as time allows

"Reports directly to the President

"Maintains effective communication with the board

"Reports to regular meetings

"Lends support in areas of policy pertaining to board function

"Position reviewed in September

"Conducts orientation for new board members

 The Job description is broken down into 3 broad areas and those are in turn subdivided. The first and most detailed area is:

Museum Management and Administration

    Research and installation of new exhibits

This year we had four displays at the Centre. We were to have five but one of the exhibitors cancelled the month before we opened. That caused a few problems. The main problem is that some publications need advance notice. For example the Pictou County tourism guide finalizes their copy in late January. Once its out you can't change it. Another problem is that its nearly impossible to find a replacement and assemble an exhibit with a months notice without dropping everything else. That is  generally not an option at that time of year and especially not this past year. Fortunately, the first display (Pictou in the Abstract) was able to extend their time.

That display was followed by “ Designing Pictou County ”, The “Pictou Historical Photo Society” and the  “Pictou County Artists”.

      Prepares grant applications

We’ve done well this year. We received help through programs for 4 summer students. Two were for Hector Centre Staff the other two were for walking tour staff. We are owed about $2500.00 from those various grants. I finished all the final reports for the 4 grants about 2 weeks ago so we should be getting the remainder of those grant monies any day now.

The other major personnel grant for the past year has been through the Heritage Properties Initiative. This a Federal/Provincial partnership aimed at preserving Canadian heritage properties. They do many things, one of which is transferring data from a survey of century homes done in the 80's to a database. We have copies of the survey for the town of Pictou and those of the county (but not the other towns). They (HPI) have contracted us to transfer the data. This has been done in series of contracts. We in turn have subcontracted Lori Johnston to do the actual work. We use ¾ of the money to pay Lori and the other ¼ is ours as an administration fee. We are now on the last phase of that work (which should be done early November) and in the end our total administration fee will be just over $4000.00.

We also just submitted a Strategic Development Initiative (or SDI in short) grant proposal for approximately $26,000.00. SDI is program/pot of money from the Provincial heritage division aimed at proposals and projects which will help heritage organizations become more self sustaining. Our proposal is based on some work done last year by Paula with a diagnostic tool called “Dollars and Sense” . You may recall Paula's report to the Board and Membership. The main conclusion was that we need an organized Annual Campaign. So our proposal to SDI is just that – we would use the money to hire a consultant to work with us this winter to develop a  model that we will use year after year. The goal of the first year is to raise 25% of our operating costs which is around $15,000.00. Eventually we aim to raise 50% or more of our annual budget with the campaign. The results of the grant application will be announced in November. I've been told by Paul Collins who administers the program that we have a strong proposal, so I'm optimistic.

    Maintains all accession records for both archival & museum materials

The big job this year has been and will continue to be a complete inventory. It looks like this hasn't been done for many, many years. The prime motivation for starting one this year is our upcoming Community Museum Assistance Program (CMAP for short) evaluation which is coming next summer. It was to have come this summer but I asked for a years deferral because of all the work that needed to be done for the re-opening of McCulloch House. CMAP provides the Hector Centre with a large portion ($8538.00) of its operating money and that amount is based on the evaluation score done every 5 years. The most challenging part of the evaluation is the accession records check. The team chooses an artifact or archival document at random then looks at its record to see if the information is accurate and up to date. They then choose a  record at random and locate and check the artifact or document.

Our records were a mess and riddled with errors. It was extremely fortunate that we had such a great team of students this year – they worked tirelessly on the inventory updating and correcting the records. There are 28 binders of accession records. They managed to get through more than 20 before time ran out. Allison (who works at the house) is carrying on the project with the other McCulloch House staff until October 15th and that will take care of the first check through. There were many records with questions that they couldn't answer. Rather than try to work through each one (which would have meant they wouldn't have made nearly the progress they did) they noted each one. My job this winter will be to go back and clear all of these up.

Once our paper records are accurate we will update our electronic records. This will be a relatively easy job involving changing the database records by referring to the paper records.

    Ensures proper storage

    Recommends & implements changes

    Establishes and reviews long term plans

I have blended these three because most of my work on recent changes and my recommendations for changes and long term plans involve storage.

Working within our current limitations we are moving all archival materials into the vault and all artifacts into an artifact storage area in the room across from my office. Both of these are being divided into areas for processed material and areas for un-processed material. The students and myself got most of that job done this summer. I will finish the remainder this winter. Storage is another large component of the CMAP evaluation.

My recommendation for changes and long term planning are as follows:

There are a few expansion plans stored in the files. In my opinion the reason they were never acted on is that they were too ambitious and too overwhelming. I propose that we take a more do-able step. As you know there is a set of loading doors in the back which are currently blocked off. Outside of these is an apron of pavement which measures approximately 15 by 45 feet. I asked for a quote from one company for an insulated steel building which would fit in that space and was quite surprised at how little it would be. The total of the quote which includes shipping and HST is approximately $13,500.00. There would be other costs of course (heat and electricity, and remodeling of the kitchen for example) but even if the costs were to double the benefits would be enormous. We would alleviate our storage and space issues for years to come, we would regain the space taken by the vault and research area and, we would be able to responsibly accept donations of large artifacts and collections. The nature of such a structure is such that future expansion is relatively simple. We could begin investigating the possibility of becoming the official town and county archive (a similar situation to several other heritage organizations throughout the province).

If we choose to go this route it ties in neatly with our annual campaign in that it gives us a concrete goal we can communicate to the public and it is the sort of project I believe a corporate sponsor or foundation would like to affiliate themselves with. If we decide to go ahead I think we should aim for completing the project 3 years from now.

        Care and maintenance of buildings and grounds

This used to be the most frustrating and challenging aspects of this job. Until this year there was not the resources needed to do this adequately. 

Now we are making real progress. McCulloch house was completely repaired by Transportation and Public Works (or TPW) and we were given a brand new furnace by them. They also ( albeit finally and at the last minute) fulfilled their promise to take care of the dead trees and over grown brush in front of the house. There is still more to do but they have promised to finish the job before the winter. I will continue to remind them of this.

Finally, the restoration of the full McCulloch budget allowed me to hire a very handyman/ Interpreter (Mike Adamson) who spends a lot of time mowing and doing various maintenance jobs.

    Formulates policy and procedures

Yet another large part of the CMAP evaluation is examination of our policies and procedures. We have very few on file and what we have are outdated. This will also be a major winter project for me.

If you've ever wondered what we do all winter – just scan the report for the word: “winter”

Product development and marketing

    Seeks revenue from donations, sponsorship and other NG sources

 I've already discussed the SDI proposal, the HPI grant and the Student grants so I won't repeat those.

 What is note worthy is a private donation of $5000.00 that came in the spring. The donor was at the McCulloch opening and stated that they fully intend to made this an annual donation.

Raises public awareness for the site

 We've had good support from the Advocate, Evening news and CKEC  especially  around the re-opening of McCulloch House. Cable 10 has been showing several features from the Centre and recently did a half hour spot on the new exhibit which they will begin airing in November.

 Develops special events

 The only new event we launched this year was a new Canada Day event called

“ Canada dog day”. Essentially it was party for dogs and owners, with some fun contests, demonstrations and the usual hot dogs and pop. For a first time the response was great. We had about 30 people and their dogs show up. The SPCA collected donations and raised about $75.00.

 Develops new products

 Our new product this summer was regularly scheduled walking tours. In addition to the Architecture/history tour we developed last summer, the guides created a new ghost tour for the evening. In all they gave about 50 people tour through the course of the summer. If we receive funding again next year, I plan to add new tours ( a natural history and a graveyard tour).

 Implements marketing strategies

 We continue to work on: improving our archives for researchers (ie. shortening the wait times, better organization & access to information and a better space to work in); tours (see above) and the annual campaign. We took a section of a full page ad with the town in a very popular bus and tour planner guide. The Nova Scotia Museum agreed to split the cost with us as one time deal for promoting the McCulloch house opening. There were lots of web hits but no calls, let alone bus tours. Given that and that we would have to bear the full cost this year (over $ 600.00), I opted out for the coming year. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Our money would be better spent developing a promotional kit to target touring companies directly.

Develops partnerships

 Our exhibit with the designers and companies like Advocate Printing and Eastern Sign was a very successful partnership which we can expand on in the future.

 

Community development

    Oversees, trains & recruits  volunteers

 It would be impossible to mention everybody who helped so much this past year and no doubt I would miss some but you know who you are and I hope you know how very much I appreciate you! In hiring and having such a large staff this year one by-product was a training manual I developed for them. With some minor tweaking I will be able to adapt this a tool to help new volunteers and new Board members.

Develops educational programming

I tasked one of our staff at McCulloch House with coming up with Curriculum based educational program ideas over the summer. I will be reviewing her results over the winter and hope to have some programs to offer in June or next September. In the meantime I recently sent out a mass invitation to all teachers in Pictou County to visit McCulloch House free of charge for the remainder of the season. I also invited any that do to offer suggestions for programming based on what they see. If even one teacher is inspired to work with us on programming that would be a great result.

Conclusion

To conclude I just want to sum where we are with McCulloch house and hopefully clarify a few things.

McCulloch house was actually two separate but related projects:

1. The repair/renovation work done by TPW. This is strictly carpentry, painting etc.

They have yet to bill us for this but agreed to stay within $40,000.00.

To cover that, we received $40,040.00 from the Department Of Economic Development (Provincial) for this expense – this we put in the savings account to earn a bit of interest. The furnace, tree removal, grounds cleaning and exterior painting is at their own expense.

2. The new exhibit design, build and installation done by Form Media.

The total for this contract is $116,753.75. They were paid in stages. All of that work has been paid, with the exception of 5% hold back (about $5000.00) which they will get November 1 after fixing a few minor things.
The funding for project this came from:

The Town and Municipality which gave us $15,000.00 last year for the project. 

The Nova Scotia Museum gave $50,000.00 as a lump sum last year.

ACOA will give $44915.17 (=38.47%). We have received one advance of $19,235.00. I submitted the final report last week and the remainder will follow shortly.

The remaining $6838.59 has been paid by us largely through the sale of “Slates to Computers”.

McCulloch House used to receive operational funding in two equal payments of $7000.00. We now receive $40,300.00 per year also in two equal payments. I submitted the reports and paperwork last week for this which means we will soon receive our second payment of $20,150.00.

Finally, I want to mention David Carter (Assistant Curator, Design – NSM) & Stephanie Smith (Curator of Interpretation). Together they are responsible for at 17 other museums. While they didn’t totally abandon our sister museums, they did devote a hugely disproportional amount of time to our museum over the past year and, towards the end of the process, at times almost all their time to making the whole thing a great success. For that I thank them.

 

End of Report.

 

 

Darrell Burke