Developing museums and folklife

Frank McKelvey has more than forty years successful museum experience with up-to-date knowledge of museums and historic sites.

He is a well-known consultant and advisor specializing in interpretation, exhibit development, collections care, and planning. He has a strong record of exhibit, restoration, and special project conception, design, and implementation.

Known as a motivator of staff, volunteers, and students, and as an effective public speaker and workshop leader he has counseled over one hundred and seventy organizations. He has proven problem solving and decision making skills and experience with short and long range planning, budget and financial accountability, reporting and office management.

In 1989 he founded McKelvey Museum Services to provide full-time services to the museum field. Frank is a curator. He has valued the central role of the artifact as a source of knowledge and as a conduit to teaching history. He has lectured widely on how to study artifacts and how to use them in history museum interpretation. His many exhibits illustrate this commitment.

Frank is a folklorist. Currently serving as Coordinator of the Delaware State Folklife Project, and with decades of intermittent experience documenting what the people say and do, he values the words of the people who did the work. This is reflected in his exhibits, restorations, and interpreter training materials, where oral history, reminisces, diaries, genre art, and historic images were used to let the people of the past speak for themselves.

As principal of McKelvey Museum Services, Frank has consulted for over 170 museum and historic sites over the past 42 years. For each client, he selects a team of expert colleagues who, for years, have worked together and share his enthusiasm.

Frank received his B.A., American Studies, from Syracuse University in 1966 and his M.A., Museum Studies and Folklife Studies, 1968, from Cooperstown Graduate Programs, State University of New York. He teaches the Curatorship and Collections Management course for the MSST program at UD.