There are three curators at the Folger—the curator of rare books, the curator of art, and the curator of manuscripts. It's our job to care for all of the rare material in the collection.
Caring for the collection involves many things. We help make sure rare material is properly stored, handled, and displayed. We help keep it organized and catalogued. We help scholars with their questions. We help decide how to enhance the collection with new additions.
One of the best things about our job is spending time in the vault with books, pictures, and manuscripts that are up to 700 years old, and figuring out where they came from, and why they're important to scholars. Sometimes a curator is like a detective!
