Meet the Curator: Keely Rennie-Tucker

Keely Rennie-Tucker. Image from the National Park Service's page.

Keely Rennie-Tucker is a museum curator with the Museum Services Program in the Park Service's regional office for Regions 3, 4 and 5, in Omaha, Nebraska.

From stickers to fossils

She has worked with museum collections for 22 years, at universities, in a corporate collection and in the National Park Service. Her career began as an undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma — though her family might say it began when, at five, she sorted and counted her sticker collection, labelling each bag with a count by type. She volunteered at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, then the Stovall Museum, making moulds and casts of archeological objects for new exhibits, then moved on to preparing vertebrate fossils and spent a summer on paleontology fieldwork in Utah and Montana, helping move the fossil collections to the new museum.

Into the Park Service

Graduate school took her to the Museum Studies Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she kept working in the fossil preparation laboratory. Her first Park Service job was a summer internship at Wind Cave National Park during graduate school — the summer she knew her career belonged in the Park Service. The next summer she was a seasonal museum technician at Homestead National Monument of America.

After graduating she became curator at the Union Pacific Museum, hired to prepare and pack its archival collections for a new home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Valuing what federal museum collections offered, she left the private sector after almost three years for Homestead. Three years later she joined the Midwest Region's museum program and earned a second master's degree, in anthropology.

What she values

What she likes most about being a Park Service curator, she says, is the high standards and accountability the agency keeps — the stickers again. Having worked in university, private and government museums, she finds her own standards fit the Park Service's mission best. And the region's collections fascinate her, from natural history specimens to historic house museums, each with its own challenges; she learns something new every week.

Her favourite part of the job is all of it, she says: the regional office lets her challenge herself in many ways and travel to the parks. But if she had to choose, it would be the people in the field — the Park Service's museum professionals, and especially those of the Midwest Region, whom she calls some of the kindest, most passionate and hardest-working people she has met, and lifelong colleagues and friends.

Moving collections

Counting her work before the Park Service, she has led or helped with at least 15 moves of museum collections, from small archival collections to large, complex park collections. Collections are moved temporarily while buildings are strengthened, to prepare for new storage or exhibit space, or for long-term storage. Her longest move went from West Virginia to Texas.

Outside work

She and her husband have a dog, Katie. Her husband, paleontologist Shane Tucker, appears in "Flowing through Time," a short film by Niobrara National Scenic River.

Sources

Based on "Meet the Curator - Keely Rennie-Tucker," published by the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The article's photograph of the family dog is not reproduced.