AAM Presentation

This week the Director is attending the American Association of Museum's annual conference in Houston.

On Monday he presented in a session on Collection Management Plans. A collections management plan is a document that "guides the content of the collections and leads staff in a coordinated and uniform direction over time to refine and expand the value of the collections in a predetermined way." 

At the IV Desert Museum the Collections Management Plan will be an integrated strategy to help develop exhibits, programs, and plans for future accessions. In writing the plan, we will be using the following outline that has been adapted from an article entitled "Collections Planning: Pinning Down a Strategy."

This method of writing a Collections Plan as part of a Master Plan is what the director presented:

1) What is our audience?

2) How do we engage them?

3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of our collection?

4) What is our ideal collection?

5) Is there anything else we need? What would we take if it were donated?

6) Who has “complementary collections” to ours?

7) What are our needed resources for using collections to build exhibits or programs?

8) What action are we going to take?