Kuraator muuseumis ja näitusesaalis - Mõistest, ametist ja rollist
Curator at a Museum and in an Exhibition Hall - On the Concept, Job and Role

Summary/Abstract: Different senses of the Estonian term kuraator are discussed, with a focus on its use in museum context. The traditional job title for a scholar working at an Estonian museum has been teadur ‘researcher’. Over the recent decade, however, the term has been receding in museum context before some other job titles such as kuraator ‘curator’, teadur-kuraator ‘researcher-curator’ and koguhoidja-kuraator ‘keeper-curator’, with some semantic confusion around the kuraator part. Since the 1990s the Estonian kuraator has been understood as organizer of an exhibition and author of its conception’. In recent years museums have adopted another sense of the term, which is organizer and administrator of a domain’, like in, e.g., publikuprogrammide kuraator ‘curator of public programmes. A third sense, referring to the archetypal English museum worker, is ‘museum worker with a researcher’s competency, whose job is to maintain and study museum collections and arrange for their presentation’. Although the latter sense of curator still belongs to teadur ‘researcher’ in Estonian museums, a tendency towards the replacement can be sensed.

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