Elisa Phelps is the curator of anthropology at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas. She also performs administrative duties as the director of collections and programs.
When she started, Phelps was academically equipped for the job. "I studied in anthropology and then I did a graduate course in [anthropological] museum studies," she says.
"I had some internships along the way and then, by the time I was through with school, I had some experience and parlayed that into a job!"
And quite a job it is. Phelps loves her work, though it doesn't pay as well as she would like. "You're not going to get rich doing this, but if it's something that is interesting to you, then it's very well worth pursuing it. It's a lot of fun and you find rewards in things outside of making money."
For Phelps, one great reward is being able to interact with museum patrons. "I like working with the public and I like working with the different types of collections and sharing stories from the collection with the public," she says.
"I didn't want to be in a purely academic setting because I like that public aspect," she says.
Phelps' area of expertise is Native American collections and archeology. However, archeological digs aren't in the job description. Her research is relatively stationary.
"We don't have an active field research program now, so we're relying to a large extent on donations. But there's always lots of research to be done to find out more about the things that have been in the collections for a long time."
For curator Philip Lambert, research is the number one task. He is a curator of invertebrates at a large museum. His specialty? Sea cucumbers!
After completing his master's thesis on the life cycle of a snail, Lambert began an apprenticeship with the museum. Little did he know that that's where he'd stay.
"I came into this not really knowing what it was all about in the beginning. It was just a brief two-year appointment to help with an exhibit. That's how it started," he says.
He never said he wanted to be a curator. "I just wanted to do something to do with marine life. So, I'm one of the lucky ones that got into a field where I can utilize my training," he says.
"I enjoy the challenge and the variety and discovering new things. I've described five new species of sea cucumbers in the last 10 to 15 years. We have them in our collection, in the research collection. I've also written a couple of books on how to identify them."
It can take a whole year for Lambert to fully research and identify just a couple of sea cucumber specimens. "In this kind of work, you can do a lot with just the specimens you have on hand without ever going out again," he says.
"We collect a lot of material in a two-week trip. It kind of takes you the rest of the year to process them and look at them and identify them and make any sense of it.
"I'm working on another new species right at the moment...and I just discovered a couple more specimens as I was doing a routine identification of some material that was donated from the Queen Charlottes!" says Lambert.
In recent years, funding cuts have changed the scope of Lambert's tasks. Since most museums rely on government funding, curators must be able to deal with change when a museum is in a state of financial flux.
Lambert used to be able to dive for his own cucumbers with a core group of colleagues. Now, he is the only qualified marine specialist at the museum and the cost of scuba diving is beyond the museum's budget.
"Every summer, we used to do a lot of fieldwork. Every summer, we'd go out scuba diving and collecting specimens all up and down the coast, taking photographs. We have a big bank of photographs, slides of underwater life," he says.
Alternatively, Lambert has been working on a dry-land project outside of his usual research. "I'm also doing terrestrial mollusks, like snails and slugs, as a sideline almost," he says.
On the brink of retirement, Lambert is satisfied with his life as a curator. "For somebody that's got a special knowledge, it's not a huge salary. But it has its rewards -- just being paid to do what you enjoy doing!"