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Originally Posted by Matchlock
...I can hear museum people holler, "we just don't have the time to do that, we are completely overworked ...". Well, I'have heard them bring forward that argument for more than 30 years, and believe me, friend, I'm fed up with it.
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Speaking as someone who does work in a museum, I have to say that, while I sympathise - and while there are certainly, if only down to the law of averages, museum staff who neither care nor wish to hear enquiries from researchers such as you, for reasons ranging from utter idleness to indifference to matters military or plain ignorance - the majority of museums, certainly in this country, are perennially understaffed, underfunded, and struggling to catch up with themselves in the face of ever more legislation, ever growing collections, and in this time particularly, ever increasing financial stringency.
Yes, you are entitled to make enquiries. Yes, we are obliged to help enquirers out, to the best of our ability, wherever possible. The fact is, however, that when one has to juggle taking care of collections, dealing with day-to-day administration, attending to visitors and special guests, the tedious but important business of accessioning and organising, organising supplies for conservation and sales purposes, and a dozen other things besides, quite often an enquiry from a researcher, while not falling upon deaf ears, will slip to the bottom of the queue of priorities. If one has a dozen other vital tasks to perform, rummaging through archives to answer an obscure question posed by a curious researcher is quite likely not foremost in one's mind - a regrettable fact of life, to be sure, but a fact nevertheless.
I should therefore appreciate it if you would not malign us all as some variety of idle delinquents, incapable of doing our jobs or uninterested in doing so. If we at our museum receive an historical enquiry, we try to answer it as promptly and accurately as our limited resources will permit. I
joined this forum purely for the purpose of learning about our collections, with this very eventuality in mind - as well as the obvious, and even more vital, point of preserving the collection we have as best I can. You may well be frustrated by the often dilatory (or indeed stationary) response you receive from museum staff; museum staff, in many cases, are just as frustrated by having to juggle sixteen balls while an accountant waves an axe at their heads. Kindly avoid condemning us all in one swift stroke.
Edit: And by the way, what a piece! I'm surprised to see a wheel-lock still clinging to the archaic approach of propelling darts, however; could anyone enlighten me as to why that approach should still have been taken so late in the day, so to speak?