Ouch! I am guilty of trying to explain too much in too little space. As I look at a number of historical and general museums of the late 70's and 80's, such as the Edison Institute (Greenfield Village, Henry Ford Museum), the New York Historical Society, the Detroit Historical Museum, and a host of others that had large able curatorial staffs that have now been reduced of as much as 80%. Certainly, good museum graduate programs( and not all are good) turn out bright well trained folks who have better backgrounds in general museum operations than starting museum professionals had in the past. We are turning out a generation of people who have training in how to run a generic museum. What I have found, and I admit this is not a valid sample, in my museum visits are curators in charge of tool collections that don't know a jack plane from a block plane, curators in military museums who don't know a rifle from a smooth bore. I think this is more of a problem in historical museums than natural history museums.