The Museum Curator?s Guide: Understanding, Managing and Presenting Objects

The Museum Curator’s Guide is a practical reference book for emerging arts and heritage professionals working with a wide range of objects (including fine art, decorative arts, social history, ethnographic and archaeological collections), and explores the core work of the curator within a gallery or museum setting.

Nicola Pickering provides a clear introduction to current material culture and museum studies theories, and shows the practical application of these theories to museum collections. She considers the role of the curator, their duties and interaction with objects, and also examines the care or preservation of objects and the ways they can be catalogued, displayed, moved, arranged, stored, interpreted and explained in museums today.

The Museum Curator’s Guide represents an essential and lasting resource for all those working with the collection, preservation and presentation of objects, including students of collections management and curatorship; current gallery and museum professionals; and private collectors.

Dr Nicola Pickering is Teaching Fellow in Museum Studies at the University of Reading. She was formerly Senior Curator at London Transport Museum and Curator at Eton College and with the National Trust. She has contributed  to the publications King's College Chapel 1515-2015: Music, Art and Religion in Cambridge (2014), The Country House, Material Culture and Consumption (2015) and Winckelmann in Italy: Curiosity and Connoisseurship in the Eighteenth-Century Gentleman's Study (2018).