Articles, Insights & Case Studies from the Field

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is among the oldest museums of its type in the world, and is home to one of the finest collections of human cultural history.

In 2011, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) jointly acquired a collection of over 2,000 works by Robert Mapplethorpe from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation (RMF).

Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is widely considered to be one of the finest college art museums in the United States.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has a long history of presenting important performance art, both in their collection and through the Whitney Biennial.

Opened in 1963, the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, is dedicated to the life and work of expressionist pioneer Edvard Munch. The museum maintains the most comprehensive collection of works by Munch, including approximately 1,100 paintings, 7,000 drawings, and 18,000 prints. The collection also includes sculptures, photographs, and 30,000 pages of letters, drafts, exhibition lists, and manuscripts.

Chapman University Art Collections is a unique group of collections that functions through the lens of education and consists of the Phyllis & Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, the Chapman Campus Collection, and the Hilbert Museum of California Art. Objects from the collections are displayed beyond the gallery, throughout the Chapman campus: it is a museum without walls. The collection supports over 1,000 objects of contemporary and modern American art, as well as many works by local artists.

The Stark Museum accomplished their latest project: digitizing and documenting John James Audubon’s personal copy of The Birds of America. The project goal was to document and preserve the Audubon volumes while increasing accessibility for museum staff, researchers, and the public.

The California Department of Parks and Recreation, otherwise known as California State Parks, has a mandate to preserve, protect, and interpret its museum collections which includes museum objects, natural history specimens, paleontological specimens, archaeological artifacts, and archive materials. The museum collections consist of millions of objects which are housed and stored throughout many of its 280 parks including the storage facilities of the Statewide Museum Collections Center (SMCC) located in the Sacramento area.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology is Canada’s only museum dedicated exclusively to the science of palaeontology, and houses one of the world’s largest displays of dinosaurs and prehistoric life.

The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, in Berkeley, California, is working on a project, jointly sponsored by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, to compile a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and works on paper by American artist Richard Diebenkorn.

The Indian Arts Research Center (IARC), a division of the School for Advanced Research (SAR) located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, implemented TMS from Gallery Systems to efficiently manage their extensive collection of Southwestern Native Art.

With increased government requirements to provide broader access to collection information, cultural institutions in the United Kingdom are rethinking their strategy on community outreach. One way in which institutions are meeting these requirements is by publishing collection information on their website.