>> My name is Jonathan Frederick Walz.
I am the curator at the Cornell Fine Arts Museums here at Rollins College
and being a curator entails a lot of different kinds of work, research,
also working with donors and sometimes living artists.
I do some teaching, give tours, work with objects in the collection.
Whenever I give tours I tend to tell students who don't know what a curator is
that it's analogous to being like a librarian.
Whereas a librarian is concerned about a collection of books, a curator is somebody
who is in charge of a collection but instead of books it's objects.
So I spend a lot of time actually working on relationships and that involves a lot
of correspondence, so e-mail is something I do every day,
can't escape it, research, certainly planning.
I do a lot of planning so it's important
to know a little bit how money works and also project management.
I would say a typical day I might give a tour so I would be downstairs interacting
with the public in a very interpretive kind of way, instructional.
Gosh, so many things that I do, research on potential exhibitions or artists that I want
to work with or objects to include in terms of a purchase, so it can be very varied.
I'm also in meetings a lot.
At Rollins I'm the only curator and our staff is fairly small
so I do many more administrative things than a larger museum with a larger museum staff
and curatorial staff might have to do less administrative tasks
because they have other support staff to be able to do those kinds of things.
So I think just in terms of career it's depends on where you land
and the kind of institution you work for.