The Brant Museum and Archives is a collection of zeitgeists of museums ideas of the day.  It creates haphazard series of systems created by curators of the years.  So when you are looking for information, things are not stored in one central location, but rather are stores in a series of locations with finding aids.  You then are required to look through multiple place to ensure that you have all to information.

As research is an ongoing process it can never be truthfully considered complete.  I often find that you have one or two questions that you are trying to answer for someone, which inevitably creates 4 or 5 other questions along the way.

The way that we use to accept research requests was that they would be collected and a summer student would do the research over the summer months.  When I started at the museum staff had turned that into an “on demand” service.  They would tell visitors the price, but if you buy a membership, you have unlimited access.  This was poor fiscal planning as it demands high staff resource with minimal income to cover staff time.

Now we have created a research request form where visitors can fill out the form in person or on our website and email to staff to conduct research.  This allows us the time to search, at our own pace, the museum for potential resources that researchers may want to review.  We call to inform participants that we have pulled things and they are ready for them to review.

This works for the majority of research requests.  However, if someone is from another part of the province or out of the country, this process breaks down and I really on my memory and pulling things as quickly as I can.

I never know how people are going to respond to this approach as I find it is rather random and we may not pull everything that the researcher is expecting.

Every once and a while you are checking the daily mail and something like this arrives:

As downtrodden as we sometimes get in the heritage sector with the demands of our work, when you receive a simple thank you note, it is surprises how much people value your expertise and your work.