Re: Shedding of veils

[Cary Karp <karp@nrm.se>]

Since I'm the one who suggested that the list members introduce
themselves, there's no excuse for not doing so, myself.

I did my first professional work as a musical instrument technician
about 30 years ago. My teenage years were spent hanging around
workshops on 48th Street in Manhattan, sharing my time between
woodwinds and fretted instruments. I subsequently moved to Germany
where I acquired a journeyman's letter as a woodwind maker, proceeding
from there to Sweden, where I set up shop 23 years ago.

A part of my apprenticeship involved visiting various European museums
to familiarize myself with their collections of historic musical
instruments. While on such a visit I met Friedemann Hellwig (one of
the moderators of this list) who suggested that I might want to
consider a career as a museum conservator. Being enticed by this
suggestion I plowed through the literature to which he referred me,
expanded the scope of my study visits to museums to include as much
time as possible in their conservation labs, and ended up doing
contract work for the Music Museum in Stockholm immediately upon my
arrival in Sweden.

Ever increasing museum activity resulted in ever diminishing private
workshop activity and I accepted the offer of a curatorship at the
Music Museum a year or so later. This position involved both
curatorial responsibility in the conventional sense and responsibility
for the museum's conservation activities, including a substantial
amount of work directly at the bench. (I landed the curatorship
because I had a BA in musicology. That subsequently become a PhD in
the same discipline, plus an associate professorship in organology at
Upsala University.)

During my twenty year tenure at the Music Museum, I became thoroughly
familiar with every aspect of the management of a museum collection of
musical instruments. During latter years my activities became
increasingly concentrated on various aspects of the applications of
computers to museum work, most particularly those involving networked
services.

Three years ago I changed jobs and am now the director of the
Department of Information Technology at the Swedish Museum of Natural
History. A significant part of my activities there involve helping the
Swedish museum community establish a presence on the Internet. (This
includes the Music Museum which, as the publisher of the original
MICAT stuff, provides justification for the Natural History Museum's
facilities being used for MICAT-L.)

When the master of my own time I spend as much of it as possible
playing the clarinet (something I started doing at the age of 6). I've
also returned to the bench where I work on both that instrument and
its various siblings.

Cary Karp <ck@nrm.se>       Department of Information Technology
Phone: +46 8 666 4055       Swedish Museum of Natural History
Fax:   +46 8 15 22 77       Box 50007, 104 05 Stockholm, Sweden