Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-2017
Capstone Advisor
Kenneth Walsleben
Honors Reader
Breagin Riley
Capstone Major
Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises
Capstone College
Management
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Professional
Subject Categories
Business
Abstract
This project explores the future of the museum industry and seeks to examine the ways in which the industry has changed to adapt to the current competitive environment. It explores the increasing competitiveness inside the industry and the growing concentration of funding that has resulted in an extremely high percentage of unfunded museums.
The strategies that can be effectively employed to ‘modernize’ a museum are examined and several living history museums that have employed these strategies are used as examples of their relative effectiveness/ineffectiveness. An analysis of how the museum industry has morphed over time to create these mega-museums which effectively dominate all their competitors is explored. It appears that they are a product of funding trends within the industry. How the evolution of these mega-museums has created an opportunity for smaller museums to regain market share by duplicating their museum partnerships on a different scale. The possibility that these partnerships may enable small museums to overcome many of the barriers that have held them back (awareness, location, etc).
Recommended Citation
Cox, Stephanie, "Preserving the Past: The Future of Museums" (2017). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 1070.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/1070
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
