Anthroplogy

Registrar of Loans, UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Anne is the Registrar of Loans at the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The main role of her position is to oversee every request that comes to the museum for the loaning of collection pieces. Whether in the museum or taking part in a shipment as a courier, Anne gets to see and handle pieces of art that haven’t been handled in over 5,000 years!

Transcript

>> My name is [inaudible] and I'm the registrar for loans at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Archaeology and Anthropology. So it covers basically the entire world; you find Egyptian mummies, you can find American pottery, you can find Asian textiles but it's kind of all over the map, which is exciting because you can find a little bit of everything there. A lot of times when I say I'm a registrar for loans, people kind of look at me like well, what does that mean; so museums are great because they often share objects with each other for different exhibits and someone has to coordinate all of that. So if another institution wants to borrow our objects for their exhibit, they'll send us a request and I'm the one that processes all of that so it involves an amount of paperwork, loan agreements, receipts, contracts, all that but then it also involves getting mounts made for the objects and getting the objects packed and crated, getting them shipped, transportation, couriers. Occasionally I get to courier the objects which is a lot of fun but I recently -- just two months ago, I was in Barcelona, couriering some objects there, which was a lot of fun. Next week I'll be in Minnesota so quite a bit of traveling but also quite a bit of working at the museum and it's a nice balance. So it can completely vary so yesterday I had our packing company in packing some objects that are going to go to Toronto next week so they came in, I set them up in the packing room, I sort of supervised them as they're packing up our objects. I check on them throughout the day. If they're not there, I might be at my desk doing emailing with other institutions or I could be down in storage, helping collections managers move objects, it's -- that's what's fun about it, it varies every day. I get to do something different.

Download transcript

Videos in this playlist

1 / 20