Museum Development Officer Network

This paper was delivered by Dr Dan Robinson, Director, Cultural Heritage, Queensland Museum at the MAQ State Conference, 15-16 September 2001, Cairns

Current situation

The Queensland Museum currently employs five MDOs.

You may have met four of them here at the conference.

The expectation of the MDOs, in terms of their Position Descriptions is:

The Museum Development Officer will provide a professional advisory and “hands on” training service to museums, art museums, keeping places, and museum employees, paid and volunteer, throughout ........... The Officer will work from a Museum Resource Centre .............The service will cover all areas of museum operation including policy development, funding, collection development, conservation, interpretation and marketing. The primary objective of the position is to raise the level at which non-professional museum workers in the region can maintain, develop and exhibit the heritage collections under their care to a professional standard.

Regional differences and regionally identified needs have meant that each MDO has placed emphasis on different parts of the identified services. This also means that it is not easy to compare the overall success of the Program from region to region.