Museum welcomes new staff

BETHEL — The Maine Mineral & Gem Museum (MMGM), which will open in Summer 2013, has hired three professionals to assist with collections, administration and development. MMGM welcomes Carl A. Francis, PhD, Barbra V.S. Barrett, and Mary Ellen W. Hern as part of the team creating Maine’s first nonprofit museum dedicated to Maine’s gems, minerals, and mining in the state.

Dr. Carl A. Francis is Consulting Curator for MMGM. He recently retired as Curator of the Harvard Mineralogical Museum, where he worked from 1977 to 2011. He also taught in Harvard University’s Museum Studies M.A. Program.

Carl is well known to rockhounds around the world, serving as Executive Editor for Rocks & Minerals Magazine, as Chairman for the Commission on Museums to the International Mineralogical Association, and as a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America. Carl lives with his wife, Diane in Braintree, MA, where he is act

Barbra Barrett is Chief of Operations for MMGM. She was most recently Administrator of Boxberry Elementary School, Oxford, since 2010, recruiting students, fundraising, marketing and working with board, parents and teachers.

Barbra was Program Coordinator for the Androscoggin River Watershed Council from 2003 to 2009, promoting the Council’s environmental and economic mission through fundraising, coordinating the annual Source to the Sea Canoe Trek, and developing educational curriculum and promotional materials.

Barbra worked as Program and Volunteer Coordinator for McLaughlin Garden in South Paris. She came to Maine through her work as a Course Director for Hurricane Island Outward Bound, in Maine and Florida, from 1994 to 2003, coordinating youth, adult and semester courses in the USA and Europe.

She lives in Albany Township with her husband, Bruce and sons, Myles and Oliver.

Mary Ellen Hern is Museum Consultant for MMGM. She was Founding Director of the Historic House Trust of New York City, fundraiser for the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, and has worked for the Shaker Museum & Library in Old Chatham, the New York State Council on the Arts, Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, and was Assistant Director of “Art Of the Olmsted Landscape,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She lectures on museum management and fundraising for the SUNY Albany M.A. in Public History, and lives in Kinderhook, NY with husband, Damon and children, Zander and Charlotte.

For more information, contact Barbra Barrett, Maine Mineral and Gem Museum, at 824-3036, or bbarrett@mainemineralmuseum.org. Museum offices are located at 57 Main Street, Bethel. Visit MMGM’s website at www.mainemineralmuseum.org.