About & methodology

A specialist job board for the museum, gallery and cultural sector: curatorial roles, collections and registration, conservation, archives, education and public programmes, exhibition production, research and institutional leadership, plus internships and fellowships. It covers institutions worldwide, with the densest coverage in Europe, the United Kingdom and North America.

It exists because the alternative is checking forty career pages by hand. Sector roles are advertised on institutions’ own websites, often briefly, often without ever reaching a general job board — and the people best suited to them are usually the ones not watching for them.

Listings are gathered automatically from more than 400 working sources — overwhelmingly institutions’ own careers pages, where museums, galleries and cultural organisations publish their own vacancies. Where a role reaches us another way, the page names the employing institution rather than the intermediary.

Every listing links to the original posting on the employer’s own site. CuratorSearch is an index, not the source of record: apply where the institution asks you to.

Employers can also post directly, which is the one paid product on the site. Direct postings are reviewed by a person before they appear and are labelled as such.

The full set of sources is re-checked once a day, at 06:00 UTC. Each listing page shows a Last verified date: the most recent run that confirmed the vacancy was still posted at its source.

A role is only marked closed after it has been missing from two consecutive daily runs. One missed run is more often a site outage or a redesign than a filled post, and expiring on a single miss would remove live vacancies.

The page stays online, marked as closed and dated. It is not deleted and does not become a broken link: people cite these pages, and a closed vacancy is still a useful record of what an institution advertised, and for what pay.

Closed pages stop describing themselves as open vacancies in their machine-readable markup, so they cannot resurface in job search results as though still available.

Only a minority of sector postings state pay at all, and that silence is itself the finding. Every figure published on the salaries page comes from what a posting actually advertised — either an explicit amount, or a public pay grade that maps to a published salary table. Nothing is estimated, modelled or inferred from job titles, and figures are never converted between currencies at source.

Salaries are archived permanently once observed, so the record survives the listing. The full archive is free to download and cite, and the method — including its current limits — is set out in full on that page.

If a listing is wrong, out of date, or attributed to the wrong institution, write to support@curatorsearch.com and it will be fixed. Institutions that would rather not be indexed at all can say so at the same address.

CuratorSearch is built and edited by a working curator, independently. Institutions pay nothing to be indexed, and no amount of money moves a gathered listing up the board.

Employers can buy a direct posting, which appears in a Featured slot above the listings and in the Friday digest. Those are always labelled Featured · posted directly by the employer, they are capped so the digest never opens with a wall of advertising, and they are the only paid placement on the site. If it is not labelled, nobody paid for it.

The board is free to read. A membership tier funds the work and pays for same-day alerts and complete access; the weekly digest and the salary data stay free.