Our Strategic Vision and Plan
We transform understanding of our common human experience
Open today 10 am – 5 pm
We transform understanding of our common human experience
…to be a center for inquiry and the ongoing exploration of humanity for our University of Pennsylvania, regional, national, and global communities, following ethical standards and practices.
In 2022, at a moment of shifting societal expectations for institutions of culture and higher education, at the Penn Museum we undertook a strategic visioning process to reflect on our Museum’s core purpose, its identity, and how it will continue to thrive in an environment of rapid social and cultural change.
The Penn Museum is at the center of many conversations about the ethics and accountability of institutions. These conversations have inspired us to be reflective rather than reactive as we strive—in alignment with Penn’s strategic framework In Principle and Practice—to foster leadership and service and to deepen our connection with our neighbors and the world.
Through the visioning process, and in the Strategic Vision document that summarized it, we articulated our new vision and mission and identified our five core mission areas—research, collections stewardship, education, interpretation, and experiences. We also identified 10 priority actions that will advance one or more of these core mission areas which informed the goals of our Strategic Plan.
Our three-year Strategic Plan outlines how our 10 Museum-wide goals will advance our vision to transform understanding of our common human experience.
Collectively, these 10 goals will:
Our broader, overarching goal—utilizing our central position at a major research university, and through work by a committed staff with deep expertise—is to be a new and inspiring model of a 21st-century institution.
We make the ancient past relevant by integrating our research into everything we do and connecting it to our communities’ lived experiences—in our galleries, publications, and other channels.
We engage with contemporary issues of societal, cultural, and environmental importance that affect everyone we serve, including our staff.
We build trust by being transparent, responsive, open to feedback, and respectful of various perspectives.
We share authority by seeking and embracing opportunities to co-create with our communities in advancing the understanding and interpretation of our collections.
We confront institutional bias by facilitating equitable access for everyone and ensuring breadth of representation, participation, thought, and action.
We go beyond the mandate by developing and modeling best practices for how to be an ethical museum, starting by promoting ethical stewardship of collections and going beyond meeting legal requirements for how we operate.
CENTRALIZE AND BUILD GREATER CAPACITY AND IMPACT FOR THE WIDE RANGE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE ENDEAVORS AT THE MUSEUM AND THE UNIVERSITY.
Archaeology is the study of the past; cultural heritage is how we use that past in the present. The Penn Cultural Heritage Center (PennCHC), a research center within the Museum, was founded in 2008 to be the gathering place on campus for an international community engaged with the management and study of tangible and intangible cultural heritage: faculty, staff, students, and national and international visitors. By bringing together practitioners from across the globe, an expanded and strengthened PennCHC will identify innovations and best practices in collection practices and community partnerships, and model them across the University and beyond.
DEEPEN AND BROADEN OUR RESEARCH, UTILIZING STATE-OF THE ART TECHNOLOGY AND ENGAGEMENT MODES.
Research activity impacts every department in the Museum and connects us to new ideas and new audiences. We provide independent research opportunities for Penn students; collaborate with our Consulting Scholars on research, collections stewardship, and education; and partner with faculty at Penn and other Philadelphia-area universities—as well as national and international collaborators and colleagues, who offer a robust tradition of external research on our collections.
Embracing the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of research, moving forward we will deepen our work in existing areas and expand into new ones. Working hand-in-hand with local communities and stakeholders, we will centralize and intensify our cultural heritage work, a common denominator for all our research.
CREATE A NEW INTERPRETIVE PLAN THAT TELLS THE WHOLE STORY OF OUR COLLECTIONS AND CONNECTS THEM TO TOPICS THAT MATTER TO OUR AUDIENCES.
Our Museum-wide Interpretive Plan will inform galleries, exhibitions, and the programs that activate them, connecting collection with visitors’ lives today in a cohesive experience. It will outline approaches for storytelling, design, and accessibility and shape narratives that attract new audiences and partnerships.
Interpretation will speak to our shared humanity: elevating narratives that are not traditionally told; inviting contemporary and local voices into interpretation; embracing co-creation with our communities; and sharing transparently the origins and histories of our collections.
STREAMLINE AND STRENGTHEN STORYTELLING AROUND COLLECTIONS, EXHIBITIONS, RESEARCH, PROGRAMS, AND COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS.
We will connect rarely heard narratives with the widest possible audiences through strategic content curation across our Museum-owned digital media channels—social media, website, email, blog, and mobile app. By amplifying the myriad stories in our global collection, we strengthen thought leadership in research and education and and ensure a continual broadening of the Museum’s reach. Our content taskforce, with representation from every Museum department, identifies program and partnership opportunities and creates the infrastructure for creating and curating published content.
BUILD BEST PRACTICES IN PROVENANCE RESEARCH AND VOLUNTARY REPATRIATION BY CONVENING PEER SCHOLARS AND MUSEUM PROFESSIONALS TO DISCUSS CURRENT PRACTICE AND DEVELOP SHARED PROTOCOLS.
With its history, leadership in the museum field, ongoing research mandate, and positioning within the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum is well situated to become a thought leader for discussions on major issues currently facing museums nationally and internationally. By leveraging internal and external resources, we can solve problems, share ideas, and innovate with colleagues around issues of contemporary relevance, like determining the provenance of important cultural objects that illegally cross international borders and conducting voluntary repatriation of culturally sensitive items to their communities of origin. While acting with humility in reckoning with our past, we move forward with confidence in our ability to model best practices within and beyond the Museum.
DEVELOP A CO-CREATION MODEL FOR AUDIENCE PROGRAMS AND EXPERIENCES WITH RICH OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS.
By inviting community partners to co-create the programs that directly impact them, the Museum can better serve all parts of our community, deepening engagement with both current and new audiences. Consulting with our community advisors and analyzing multi-year visitor data helps us build an engaging, contemporary, and responsive personality for the Penn Museum, with programming that engages issues that matter to contemporary communities and connects our audiences’ lived experiences to collections and fieldwork. Moving beyond the Museum’s walls, we will create a robust presence both off-site and online, while ensuring that the audience experience is consistent and accessible across all touchpoints—onsite, off-site, and online.
ARTICULATE A PLAN FOR ON- AND OFF-SITE COLLECTIONS STORAGE CENTERING PRESERVATION AND ACCESS.
We will develop a comprehensive and achievable long-term plan for both on- and off-site storage rooted in collections preservation and broad access for study by scholars, students, and descendent communities. The plan will be informed by a large-scale, independent assessment of collections storage that will make recommendations for short-term mitigation efforts and longer-term strategies addressing areas of greatest need, including the exploration of permanent off-site storage.
CREATE A MUSEUM CULTURE AND PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT THAT IS WELCOMING, INSPIRING, ACCESSIBLE, AND CONDUCIVE TO LEARNING.
Providing an inspiring and comfortable environment supports all areas of the Museum’s mission. It allows audiences to enjoy our collections; facilitates research; encourages program attendance and drives visitors to the café and shop; and enhances overall awareness of our work. Through staff training, improvements to wayfinding, and an improved dining experience, we will ensure a welcoming and comfortable environment that inspires repeat visitation and organic audience development.
STRENGTHEN COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION, AND ESTABLISH A REGULAR PROGRAM OF WELLBEING, TRAINING, AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT.
Our staff are our most valuable and valued asset. A museum functions best when staff are aware of and empowered to create synergies with their colleagues’ work. We will create synergistic working groups and a regular program of staff workshops will foster cross-disciplinary collaboration between departments, ensure that staff see how their work advances our Museum’s mission, and bring staff voices into larger questions and decisions.
We will also invest in more opportunities for employee engagement, professional development, education, and training, we seek to foster in our staff a stronger sense of belonging, and in turn create a positive impact on recruitment and retention.
UPGRADE THE MUSEUM’S KEY TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS AND CORE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE.
Almost every part of the Museum’s work is impacted by digital resources. Visitor engagement onsite and online requires building digital platforms that allow our collections to be used by many different audiences in many different contexts and fields. Of many possible areas of digital investment we will focus on our most urgent priorities: a digital asset management system (DAMS) to manage high resolution images of our collections that can support both collections stewardship and programming content, and a customer relationship management system (CRM) to better understand and deliver that content to our audiences—from our immediate neighbors to a growing community of interested viewers and digital visitors from across the world.