Museum Research

by David Bradley

Critically, museum research can easily become detached from undergraduate and graduate students unless museums foster relations with local colleges and universities, which can mean welcoming interns at this level too. University level teaching, of course, may not play a significant role in the work of a museum, in direct contrast to academia. 'Museum researchers can do pure research with no teaching or committee responsibilities, giving them more time to concentrate on their research,' says Lewis. As one might expect though, many of the scientific staff in a museum also contribute to the public understanding of science and adult education courses.

While many academic researchers lament the fact that sometimes too much of their 'research' time is spent in preparing and presenting lectures, chairing tutorials and organizing internal seminars one might suggest that without a student contingent the museum researcher would be free to research without this constraint. But, this is simply not so. Museum researchers do contribute to undergraduate, graduate and other courses, both within museums, and at universities and research centres. 'Many staff at the NHM,' explains Johnston, 'hold honorary or visiting lectureships, or personal chairs and the Museum has one joint appointment with Imperial College London.' Indeed, joint courses in areas such as taxonomy, biodiversity, and molecular systematics (molecular taxonomy) are becoming increasingly common. He adds that the NHM while hosting numerous students at universities and other research centres also has more than 100 students working within it.

What about prestige and kudos? 'It isn't clear to me that it's possible to make a general statement about this,' says Ross. 'there may very well be issues of prestige related to the size and prestige of the individual universities and museums in question, with the kind of research being done, with the degree of time going into education and administration, and so on, but none of these fall into a university-museum dichotomy.' Some of the world's leading paleontologists work at museums, after all, and taxonomy underpins absolutely every other branch of biology. 'You might be working on some high tech gene knockout system in <i>C. Elegans</i> or yeast, but how do you know that what you are working on is really <i>C. Elegans</i> or yeast? Taxonomy, that's how!' emphasizes Johnston. The state of the art in phylogenetics, systematics and genetics too is there to be found in museum research centers.

However, research conducted in a museum setting may be applied in ways contradictory to scientific methods and outcomes, according to one researcher. 'Research may be used in educational contexts that require so much simplification and modification of the outcome as to distort the original research,' posits Lewis, 'this type of presentation can create problems for the researcher in the professional research community.' Although Johnston begs to differ, 'It should be possible to explain the fundamentals to anyone and to tailor the complexity of explanation to the target audience,' he believes.

Read on... Finding a Job in Museum Research