Mastering a Museum Plan: Strategies for Exhibit Development

Mastering a Museum Plan offers a methodology for the creation of museum installations, whether they are small exhibits or museum-wide presentations. Houtgraaf and Vitali draw on their own museum planning experience at Naturalis to highlight six key areas on which installation planning should focus: intellectual and narrative content, spatial organization, the roles of team members, the role of the steering committee, a detailed timeline, and a budget. Mastering a Museum Plan provides an optimal structure for successful planning, one that allows a museum to articulate its message, organize its development activity, avoid the need for crisis management, and prevent the loss of human and material resources.

Dirk Houtgraaf is acting Director-General of the "new" Naturalis (formerly the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie), which has been hailed as the vanguard of natural history museum design. Vanda Vitali has served as Vice President of Public Programs and Director of Content Development at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. She is now the Director of the Auckland Museum in New Zealand. Peter Gale,with some 30 years of museum experience, has carefully edited and augmented the text to make it accessible and comprehensible to all readers.