Head of Collections Job Description

Responsibilities

• Lead long-range planning efforts and day-to-day activities relative to stewardship and care of the collections, including planning for and implementation of art storage efforts, collections management and preventative conservation strategies, movement of art objects, tracking of accessions and deaccessions, and collections inventory planning and execution. Creates work plans for collections care and stewardship; delegates appropriately; oversees and enforces accountability structures within department.
• Leads Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) related compliance efforts including Tribal consultations and partnership development, liaising with NAGPRA consultants, distributing inventories, managing the Museum’s NAGPRA compliance tracker and related data, and facilitating repatriations when appropriate.
• In partnership with the Museum Education Manager, facilitate collections-based academic engagement for Colorado College students and faculty. Participate in and provide support for other educational efforts; serves as department representative for public engagement/donor engagement; and partner with campus colleagues to share practices and resources across the Museum and Campus collections. • Guided by principles of critical cataloguing, develop the Museum’s approach to data management— database lexicon and structure, records mitigation, creating a user guide, and training staff. Develop these strategies in consultation with campus partners and visiting advisors including Tribal representatives and descendent community members relevant to the collection, and others as appropriate. Work with campus partners to ensure that this data is as accessible as possible to College constituencies and the Museum’s publics and partner with the Office of Information technology to continue to refine the digital archiving system for the FAC.
• Ensures that the FAC’s policies and procedures that relate to its collections and loans to/from the FAC are consistent with current and evolving museum best practice and are upheld by all departments. Develops new policies where none exist in consultation with the museum and FAC leadership teams.
• Act as liaison to the College’s office of insurance and risk management; determine and arrange adequate insurance for all museum objects, to include appropriate coverage during shipping; file liability and damage claims as necessary.
• Supervise collections staff, interns, and volunteer program; provides oversight to contract conservators and registrars as needed. Work with Human Resources to post vacancies, recruit and hire, train, schedule and assign work, provide work direction and problem-solving assistance, set goals, review performance, update job descriptions, and oversee professional development and disciplinary actions.
• Lead the Collections staff, particularly the Assistant Registrar to oversee agreements for outgoing and incoming loans, special exhibitions, or permanent installation of objects, including contractual arrangements, loan agreement forms, exhibition agreements, condition reports, facility reports, cataloging information, and other collections documents.
• Lead the Collections staff, particularly the Assistant Collections Manager, in the proper inventorying, maintenance and documentation of all Museum objects and acquisitions.
• Monitor and coordinate conservation of collections objects; process gifts and acquisitions and copyright and reproduction requests in a timely manner; with the support of the Collections team monitor all collections and exhibitions to appropriate environmental standards; implement a regular pest management program; train staff and others in proper art handling techniques.

Required Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications

Equality Statement

Accommodation Statement