President's Message 2023

by Bill Vernon

qathet Museum and Archives Society (qMAS) started 2023 with limited staff and considerable work to do After so much time searching for a Curator/Collections Manager, we, like so many businesses in the world, struggled to find qualified people to fill vacancies. We also lost another employee in February, so our needs were great.

William Adams, our Executive Director (ED) suggested a new plan to recruit and/or replace empty positions from a list of applications for the Curator position. Our ED is an experienced Curator along with his many other museum related attributes. William suggested we hire people that need additional experience and training but, in his estimation, are well able to fill the positions in time. I am pleased to announce the hiring of two dynamic people (Mary Williams and Ava Hansen) that will help qMAS as Assistant Curators fulfill its goal of becoming a world-class museum.

During the past few years, qMAS has accumulated a considerable surplus of unused cash. A substantial percentage ($110,000) of the accumulated surplus will be invested in state-of-theart mobile compressed storage shelving. This shelving will increase our storage space by almost double. Our new employees will gain experience and benefit of working through the entire process, that could take six months to completion, which includes proper packing and temporary off-site storage of the collections. All these changes will allow the museum to change exhibits regularly. Professional museum management necessitates the regular rotation of artifacts to protect their longevity and provide visitors with a fresh experience.

Other changes including a new workshop for staging exhibits, repairing artifacts and temporary storage will contribute to our goal of being a first-class museum.

In addition to the museum’s improvements, we seek to improve the Forestry Museum. We hope to have it open this summer, but work needs to be complete to make it safe, secure, and comfortable for visitors and staff. More to come in later issues as we grow our vision for the Forestry Museum.

It would be remiss to miss thanking our volunteers for their considerable contribution to the museum. They are truly a valuable resource for the museum, and we could not do without their experience, devotion, and loyalty.

We invite area residents to see what we are doing with what they own in our pursuit of excellence at qMAS.

See our Summer 2023 Program Guide for the full list of programs running from May through August! Visit our website or come by the Museum to pick up a copy!

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