Museeum Planners & Analysts

Our core team, supported as needed by our extensive network of associated museum professionals, works on selected museum planning projects (re-inventions, expansions and new museums) that promise significant com­munity impacts, creative collaboration with our client teams, and opportunities for field-wide museum innovation, built on our deep knowledge of best prac­tices and research data in the museum field.Most American and many international museum associations and the agencies and foundations that
support museums list “research” among their top priorities for the coming years. The museum field is
making research progress in museum learning, but little research has been conducted of museums as
businesses operations - the institutional research that is needed to maintain the economic and creative
health of this growing, yet endangered sector of our culture.
The White Oak Institute aspires to contribute to that need. The mission of the White Oak Institute is to
further innovation in the museum field through research, analysis, and dissemination of data-based
findings drawn from museum operations. Over the years, this new non-profit will involve museum
leaders in the kinds of field-wide research needed to inform management’s major decisions and to
advance promising innovations.
A unique characteristic of the Institute’s methodologies will be the engagement of high-level museum
managers as investigators, working with their colleagues in processes supported and facilitated by the
Institute’s data analysis and synthesis. The goal is more economically and environmentally sustainable
museums that are better able to serve the public by offering more effective community services.
The White Oak Institute is a non-profit formed by the owner/principals of White Oak Associates, Inc.,
and it benefits from that company’s resources and 39 years of service to the museum field. In that time,
it has had hundreds of museum commissions from over a hundred museums.

The job of running a museum is getting harder. Visitors can be fickle and they have had
rising expectations during the first decades of the experience and information
economies. Government support is uneven and prone to political and economic swings.
Private support is pulled towards many other worthy causes. Knowledge of the
museum’s subject is only the starting requirement for the leaders managing museums
as they become increasingly complex economic ventures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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