Traditionally, the curator's work has been in close connection with the main functions of the museum -preservation, research, and communication. The changes that have occurred at museums over the past few decades have also influenced the profession of curator. Specialisation has taken place inside the museum, and so the curator's functions have also changed. This article focuses on the curator's field of work at national museums in Finland and in the Baltic states. The analysis is mainly based on interviews conducted with curators and other museum professionals at the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum, the National History Museum of Latvia, the National Museum of Lithuania, and the National Museum of Finland. Emanating from the PRC model provided by the Reinwardt Academy as well as the global changes induced by the new museology, the focus is on the curator's connection with museum collections. The analysis shows that the curator's role is not similar in all the museums under discussion; there are regional differences in structure, curatorial duties, and priorities. While at some museums the curator is regarded as a collection keeper who can also do some research, at others they are rather researchers and have only infrequent contact with collections. KEYWORDS: museum • collection keeper • researcher • new museology • curator I N T R O D U C T I O NThroughout history the classical role of museums has been the preservation and supplementation of collections as well as research into them and their popularisation. Initially, these functions were all fulfilled by the curator -it was the first profession at the *

This paper presents research into exhibition-production practices at five national museums of four Baltic Sea region countries. The focus is the changes wrought by the expansion of exhibition teams, and how researchers in the curatorial role perceive their position, especially in relation to designers and project leaders. The analysis of semi-structured interviews with museum professionals showed exhibition production at museums comprise two models: A) curator-driven, and B) manager-driven. In Model A, the curator’s knowledge of museum collections is dominant. The curator creates the concept, and subsequently leads the exhibition project. The curator is the decision maker. In Model B, the field of communication is dominant. Managers are in charge of the design concept and fulfilling the exhibition. Managers are the decision makers. Curators feel their credibility as experts suffers and their competencies are underexploited, as they no longer have either authorship or leadership responsibilities.

The main museums in Estonia and Latvia have lately staged new exhibitions that proceed from a contemporary museological approach and reflect the results of historical research. The article compares three cases which present alternative but complementary interpretations of the Soviet period. The authors pay special attention to the application of the biographical method prominent in contemporary cultural research, and the museological method of multivocality. They conclude that in the case of multivocality, effectively addressing different visitor groups is a great challenge to curators. There is a risk that the simplified mediation of contradictory memories and views will leave a gap for visitors with less prior knowledge about the subject of the exhibition. In large exhibition teams, the curator has a crucial role to play in negotiating with team members to prevent the concept from dispersing. In the cases studied, it is possible to observe the curators’ views and detect a similar attempt to interpret complex topics through biographies. The analysis concludes that in the context of contemporary museological approaches, the voice of the curator remains essential, especially when mediating exhibits, for they cannot speak for themselves.

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This article examines how Estonian museums understand ethnographic heritage. More specifically, it is an attempt to answer the questions of how the concept of ethnographic heritage is made visible through museums’ various practices. An analysis of what criteria museums use when assigning objects to ethnographic collections is submitted as well as a description of what dilemmas they face when making a choice, and how these dilemmas are resolved in practice. It was demonstrated that assigning objects to ethnographic collections has been and continues to be a cognitive and subjective activity. What has served as the main ethnographic criteria is the object’s social origin (a farm environment, which is contrasted with the urban and manor milieu) and the method of production — manual production and the use of traditional work methods, which is contrasted with factory production and store-bought goods. Museums that focus on the way of life of an ethnic or social group rely on their own set of defining principles, as do those whose permanent in situ exposition dictates the ethnographic content in a more classical sense (farm and open-air museums). At the same time, the simultaneous use of disparate criteria has led to different results in practice. The effort to define ethnographic heritage as dating from the first quarter or first half of the 20th century has resulted in a "special treatment" of newer hand-made objects in museums with ethnographic collections. This mainly affects the placement of contemporary textile handicrafts in an ethnographic collection. Faced with the build-up of problematic choices, some museums have "frozen" their ethnographic collections, while others have adopted a dual attitude to previously set temporal and other criteria of ethnographicity. When assembling and organizing collections, museums are looking for ways to bypass the narrow boundaries previously set for ethnographic heritage and are attempting to view everyday culture as a whole. One such practice is the formation of a separate textile collection. Thus, ethnographic heritage (ethnographic object) is a changeable construction not only from the perspective of modern ethnological science, but also from the perspective of museum practice. Explicit collecting principles have an impact on the museums’ collection practices, or more generally, what kind of heritage is being created for the future. At the same time, less formal trends, such as the difficulty of collecting objects from recent history, or the special importance of stories in assessing the value of an object, or the lack of specialists working with collections and poor storage conditions are all important factors in the creation of future heritage. The subject of auxiliary collections and replicas is also of much greater significance in the practice of museum work than it appears from the formulated collection policy.