Planning and managing of museum off-site storage facilities

As the focus of museums shift from collecting and storing to serving the public interest through added programming, exhibition, retail, and restaurant space, museums will continue to transform work spaces, and downscale on-site storage for collections to accommodate expansion requirements for new areas of acquisition. The impact this shift has on collections results in inadequate storage space and the inability of the museum to accession more works. Increasingly, museums may consider moving collections out of the museum and into an off-site storage facility. In this thesis, off-site storage space will be investigated by examining practices at accredited art museums that should have high standards for the care of all collections. By examining how art museums approach the use of off-site storage facilities in terms of planning and management, assessments can be made about current operational and collections care practices and what areas can use improvement. Recommendations can then be made to the field for how to properly plan and store collections off-site, as well as how to utilize facilities most effectively