Short Museum Books To Pass the Time

Are you a museum professional in your dentist's waiting room looking for something to read, but you think finding your inner goddess with 50 Shades of Grey too much like hard work? Try these handy leaflet sized museum books

• The Curator's Guide To Fashion
• Things I Wouldn't Do For Money by a Museum Fundraiser
• Technological Advances In Museums
• The Differences Between Reality And Museum Displays
• The Museum Guide to the Management of Change
• Association of National Museum Directors: Intelligent Quotes
• Senior Curator: The Wild Years
• Everything Male Curators Know About Women
• Everything Female Curators Know About Men
• Accession Your Way to Success
• Career Opportunities for Museum Studies Graduates
• The Big Book of Acetone Cocktails
• The Museum Directors Book of Motivational Speeches
• Museum Hospitality
• eBay Guide to Ethical Museum Collections Disposal

Strange Museum Store Statistics

Museums stores are a strange netherworld rarely visited by visitors and museum staff alike. Yet it is a treasure trove of interesting troglodytes and natural fauna as well as the material culture of this great nation. Here are some interesting facts you never knew about museum stores.

» In Museum stores, there are 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 ways to lose objects.

» It only takes 7 pounds of pressure to knock the handle off your most precious Chinese vase.

» £26 billion has not been spent on upgrading museum stores in the past 20 years.

» You use more calories drinking acetone than there are in the acetone itself.

» On average, there are 178 forms of insect on each item in your clothing store.

» There are 1 million silverfish for every curator in the world.

» Odds of being killed by a stuffed dog in a museum store – 1 in 700,000.

» Odds of being killed by debris falling off store shelves – 1 in 5 billion.

» Odds of being killed by acetone poisoning – 1 in 86,000.

» Odds of being killed by getting stuck in the store quarantine freezer – 1 in 3 million.

» Odds of being killed by a faulty humidifier switch – 1 in 2 million.

» Odds of being killed in a car crash going to pick up a loan item from another museum– 1 in 5,000.

» Odds of being killed when adjusting the fiddly little lights in display cases – 1 in 2 million.

» If you read all your museum's accreditation paperwork in one go, it would only last for 10 hours and 33 minutes, but will seem like 10 years and 33 days

» The average smell in a museum store weighs 760 nanograms.

» Curator skin temperature does not go much above 95 degrees even when the store's computerised atmospheric management system goes on the blink again.

» 314 Curators have had buttock surgery in since 1994.

» Annual growth of the museum cat is 314,000%

» A museum’s desire to accept modern methods of collections management increases by .0001 seconds annually.

» The average curator flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a single storage inventory.

» There are more than 1,000 chemicals in the average museum store.

» The average museum emergency plan weighs 20 million tons.

Apologies to http://all-funny.info/weird-statistics for the inspiration

5 Rare Medical Conditions - Suitable for Museum Staff?

The 'happy museum' is a relatively recent concept, underpinning this is the concept that museums can contribute to the health and wellbeing of society in general. What nobody has particularly researched is the health and wellbeing of museum staff and volunteers. Here are some very rare diseases. Are they found in your museum and do they sound familiar to you?

Cotard's Delusion
It is a very rare condition where a person actually believes a part of their body is missing, or in more extreme cases that they are actually dead. Sufferers spend a lot of time in cemeteries, or in museum stores looking for comfort and/or spare limbs. Medication can help sufferers or alternatively they can seek solace in Chapman Brothers artwork. I would particularly recommend 'Hell' (1999).

Foreign Accent Syndrome
This causes the sufferer to speak in a foreign accent even though they have never visited the place of the accent. Sometimes lots of different  accents or a blend of accents. This is possibly an advantage in visitor services or certainly as an extra in 'Allo 'Allo! Alas only extensive speech therapy will help in these cases.

Alien Hand Syndrome
The condition involves a rogue hand that acts independently of the owner's wishes or desires. Suffers randomly grab objects. This could be a common condition among museum designers judging by some of the exhibitions I've seen. Alas there is no known cure, other than transferring staff into the education department and putting them in charge of the handling collections.

Vampire Syndrome
Technically this is an extreme sensitivity to UV rays. Given that museums are a UV zone with every window suitably screened and every store closed off to the outside world this could be common problem in the heritage sector. There are treatments available but the only solution is to stay out of daylight. Thus the ideal job is as a museum store manager or curator. This could certainly form part of the museums' health and wellbeing agenda from now on.

Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome
Perhaps less of a problem in the museum world, but has been known to drive sufferers to suicide. Museums used to be a sex free zone, but nowadays every major city seems to have a sex museum - thankfully in order to culturally appreciate and understand this most human of urges rather than to earn money through the act (although that could be the subject of my 'Sustainable Museums' blog). Anyway, the condition is put down to hypersensitivity, which is a common trait among museum folk. The only solution is take a group of inner city kids around your most fragile displays. That will surely turn give suicidal thoughts towards a more murderous turn.


There you have it. These rare diseases can find a home in museums and may even be appropriate as a place for a new form of volunteering convalescence. So as local authority museums try to find their niche within government agendas I urge you to think 'health'.