The art museum provides a variety of opportunities for Mount Holyoke students to become engaged with the functions of the art museum's professional staff, to gain "real life" work experience. Each January term, the museum offers internships through the Career Development Center. Summer internships are available through specific arrangements with museum staff members. Some of these interns have participated in an important long-term project, to inventory the museum's entire holdings. Under the registrar's supervision they examine art objects to verify data such as media and dimensions, as well as accession numbers and other information that is critical to keeping accurate records of our holdings. Interns have also been involved with various aspects of exhibition development, from researching specific artists and artworks to preparing sections of exhibition catalogues. While undertaking these tasks, interns have an opportunity to learn some of what goes on behind the scenes of an art museum and what kinds of jobs they might pursue in the future.

The Student Advisory Committee offers a very different kind of engagement with the museum. This group of students assists the staff in its efforts to enhance awareness of the museum's programs, and hence attendance, especially among the student body. They also meet with the director periodically to discuss ways the museum can be a more meaningful and prominent part of extracurricular life on campus. In addition to contributing ideas, they play active roles as liaisons between the museum and their fellow students. They concentrate their efforts on two or three events each semester around which they develop and implement a marketing strategy. And they have had palpable results—student attendance at several of the targeted events has surpassed previous averages. Once again, this work relates to initiatives spelled out in the Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003 which challenges us to "encourage greater integration of the performing and expressive arts in the curriculum and College life."

There isn't space here to draw attention to many other activities at the museum in which students are involved. This whirlwind of activity is driven by our most essential mission: to provide direct experience with original works of arts and artifacts of aesthetic and cultural merit through the acquisition, preservation, and meaningful display of a permanent collection. The Plan uses "literacies" as a metaphor to characterize the learning goals we establish for each and every graduate of this institution. And the museum plays a very important role in advancing the mission of Mount Holyoke College by affirming visual literacy as an essential component of a liberal arts education.