My first visit to London's Natural History Museum (NHM), now only a distant memory, must have been at the age of seven or eight, when I accompanied my parents and younger sister. I do recall the imposing, blackened skeleton of a giant sauropod, Diplodocus, that greeted me as I entered the massive front doors of the main building. But what also struck me at the time was just how many "taxidermed" animals could be stuffed into row upon row of glass cases. When I recently took my own children to the museum, things could not have been more different. The Diplodocus still stands guard, but most of those arrays of dusty species seem to have been tucked out of sight and replaced with a much more lively and fun view of natural history, featuring all kinds of hands-on and multimedia exhibits and galleries.

Behind the scenes, though, I suspect that the same curiosity-driven research underpins museums like this around the globe. Who are the researchers opting out of everyday academia to work among those glass cases and dinosaur bones?

David Johnston is one such scientist. "As with the majority of researchers, one rarely is able at graduation time to say, 'I want to spend my life researching x, y, or z.' Instead, you change fields as job contracts necessitate, and finding employment is dictated by experience and expertise." Johnston's skills in fundamental molecular biology landed him his first postdoctoral position, sequencing from parasitic flatworms (schistosomes), a group second only to malaria parasites as a global health problem, at the Natural History Museum. Tenure followed.

Museums, of course, are as diverse as any other area of human culture, from fine and decorative arts, to antiquities and archeology, to ethnographic and natural history and medicine. The type of research might involve reconstruction, preservation, examination, analysis, and dating. In terms of research, as with any scientific endeavor, a detailed understanding of the contextual relevance of the research subject is crucial. But while the tools of the trade may be similar, context underlies the differences between academic and museum research, although perhaps only inasmuch as research focuses on collection materials. The questions being asked can be very similar - what about the material itself, or "what does this material tell us about patterns and processes in the outside world?"

Robert Ross, formerly on the faculty at Shizuoka University in Japan, is now director of education at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York, which is loosely affiliated with Cornell University. "We are doing scientific research within the museum," says Ross. "I do believe some of our research is different from that done in some large museums with large staffs of researchers, because ours is so tightly integrated with public education."

In making the move from a university to a museum, the job and not the type of building should perhaps be one's guide. In hindsight, some museum researchers realize just how narrowly focused their university work was in comparison to their museum work. "Researchers may be surprised to find greater fulfillment at a museum and to enjoy considering doing and conveying their research in entirely new contexts," says Ross.

"The oldest and most common route is by being a recognized expert in your field and affiliating with or being hired by a museum," says Michael Lewis, curator of archaeology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. "This route," he adds, "does not necessarily require an advanced degree, although strong emphasis recently has been placed on the master's degree as a minimum - preferably the Ph.D." Moreover, in today's museum world, the emphasis is on attracting research dollars, and this generally requires an advanced degree and a research history.

Ross feels that museum researchers tend to follow a normal academic route. "I have known a few people who were looking specifically for museum work because they wanted to work with collections and/or they wanted to work in public education, but their training was no different," he says. "A few may seek training in collections maintenance, but most learn on the job." At the NHM and other museums, collections maintenance is recognized as a separate skill, so there are scientific curators looking after the collections and researchers who work on them. "Whether this is a happy division is a matter of debate," Johnston suggests.

In terms of the ease of shifting from academia to the museum environment, Ross feels it is not intellectually more difficult, but concedes that there can be important new skills to develop. "Many natural history museum researchers are responsible for taking care of collections, and must learn database technology, preservation issues, and so on," he says. "Researchers at museums are also often called upon for advice with exhibits, for programs for the public, or to give media interviews when something even vaguely related to their research shows up in the newspaper," he adds. Johnston suggests that "maybe science wouldn't have such a bad reputation in the public's eyes if all scientists did this more often."

"Indeed," he adds, "the soon-to-be completed Darwin Centre (Phase 1), which will house the Zoology Department and spirit collections, has been designed to maximize scientist-public interaction." In addition, museum outreach programs are extending substantially the educational role of scientists in museums. Certainly many scientists teach and mentor students in academia as part of their wider job description. "Museum researchers often must respond to the public outreach and education role of the museum," adds Lewis. "This may predetermine the type of outcome or the manner of presentation of museum research in response to nonacademic or purely scientific concerns."

In theory, the research itself and the source of funding are identical in museums and academia, but there are other pressures that also can color museum research, such as the museum's collection itself. Ross explains, "Individuals are often hired who are expected to use the museum collections in their research, and interesting new research questions are often posed through exposure to available collections, new collections as they become available, or collections from museum-administrated expeditions." Commonly, the two communities - collections-based and field-based researchers - publish in different venues, but there is some overlap.

Critically speaking, museum research can easily become detached from undergraduate and graduate students unless museums foster relations with local colleges and universities, which can mean welcoming interns at this level, too. University level teaching, of course, may not play a significant role in the work of a museum, in direct contrast to academia. "Museum researchers can do pure research with no teaching or committee responsibilities, giving them more time to concentrate on their research," says Lewis. As one might expect, though, many of the scientific staff in a museum also contribute to the public understanding of science and to adult education courses.

Since many academic researchers lament the fact that much of their "research time" is spent preparing and presenting lectures, chairing tutorials, and organizing internal seminars, it might seem that without the constraints a student contingent necessitates, the museum researcher would be more free for research. But this simply is not so. Museum researchers do contribute to undergraduate, graduate, and other courses, both within museums and at universities and research centers. "Many staff at the NHM hold honorary or visiting lectureships or personal chairs, and the museum has one joint appointment with Imperial College London," Johnston explains.

Indeed, joint courses in areas such as taxonomy, biodiversity, and molecular systematics (molecular taxonomy) are becoming increasingly common. He adds that in addition to hosting numerous students at universities and other research centers, the NHM also has more than 100 students working within it.

What about prestige and kudos? "It isn't clear to me that it's possible to make a general statement about this," says Ross. "There may very well be issues of prestige related to the size and prestige of the individual universities and museums in question, the kind of research being done, the degree of time going into education and administration, and so on, but none of these fall into a university-museum dichotomy." After all, some of the world's leading paleontologists work at museums, and taxonomy underpins absolutely every other branch of biology. "You might be working on some high-tech gene knockout system in C. elegans or yeast, but how do you know that what you are working on is really C. elegans or yeast? Taxonomy, that's how!" Johnston says. The state of the art in phylogenetics, systematics, and genetics is there to be found in museum research centers as well.

Nonetheless, research conducted in a museum setting may be applied in ways contradictory to scientific methods and outcomes, according to one researcher. "Research may be used in educational contexts that require so much simplification and modification of the outcome as to distort the original research," posits Lewis. "This type of presentation can create problems for the researcher in the professional research community." Johnston, however, begs to differ. "It should be possible to explain the fundamentals to anyone and to tailor the complexity of explanation to the target audience," he believes.

The transition to museum research is no harder or easier than finding a job anywhere else in academia, but it may carry an added burden if one chooses to concentrate on collections-based research rather than field research, suggests Lewis. "In some disciplines, such as archaeology, collections-based research is viewed in the professional community as 'less worthy' than field research," he says. But as with conventional academic research, results are just as often presented at professional meetings and published in peer-reviewed journals. "Museum researchers use the same methods and the same tools as academic researchers, and grant-writing skills, some readers will find regrettable, are just as necessary," adds Lewis.

Research at a museum can often take on more of a public focus, particularly if external funds require it. "One's research may end up on display in exhibits or in other educational contexts, and one may be encouraged to involve volunteers from the general public or school students in the research process," says Ross. Indeed, many museums, including NHM, have such volunteer programs. There is in such cases the pressure that research might need to be tailored so that nonspecialists can participate and so that the research can readily be adapted for exhibits or educational purposes.

Museums and academia may differ in the kinds of funds they are able to obtain. Funding bodies such as the National Science Foundation have to account for the suitability of a research department of whatever disposition. Importantly, though, a museum might play the public-education card and so apply to nontraditional funding bodies interested in fostering public science education rather than research results. But perhaps this should be a role of universities as well.

Although museum research might seem to outsiders to be a very different environment than that of a life in university research, Johnston does not feel that there is much of a distinction. "They're very much the same, in fact," he says. According to Ralph Salier, an archeologist and expert on North American early man and stone tools, "one major difference is that museum jobs are far rarer than academic research posts simply because there are far fewer museums with research departments than there are universities."

Megan Dennis, who is working in North America before returning to Europe to do her Ph.D., adds that "you have to be keen and know it is what you want to do. The hardest thing is finding somewhere to get experience in museum science." As one other "anonymous" museum researcher has it, "the job market is very, very limited, and one often has to be willing to volunteer until a funded position opens."