Museum Mission Statements Analysis
DanShaw.com

What is the ideal mission statement of a museum? To begin to answer this question, I examined websites of nearly 100 air and space museums.

By definition, a museum is a place where objects of value are kept and displayed. Some mission statements are about that simple. Others mission statements include other details explored below.

What:
Artifacts, aircraft, memorabilia. Often of a certain type, in a certain domain, time or place, or service branch. Examples, air traffic control, airliners. Acquire, collect, preserve, restore, maintain, administer, house, safeguard, catalog, chronicle, display, exhibit, share.

Who:
Who forms the organization? Volunteers? Veterans? The public? Some more narrowly defined group? Non-profit?
Who does the museum commemorate? Other words: honor, eternalize.
Who does the museum benefit? Students, schools, future generations, youth, community, outreach, “of all ages”.

Where:
Some museum mission statements specify a geographic area: city, region, state, country (10% +/-). Some museums exist in or because of a historic building.

When:
Some collections are organized around a specific war or time period (5% +/-). Some mission statements specify when the collection began, which helps explain the context and answer the question, “Why?” (5% +/-).

Why:
Preserve, educate, dream, inspire, honor, motivate, challenge, pride, prestige, encourage, enjoy, excitement, love, spirit.

Of the 90+ websites surveyed, only a handful had a page titled “Mission.” Some mission statements explicitly use the term mission. Other words: purpose, dedicated.
Some put their mission statement on their home page, some on their “about us” page. In cases where the mission statement was on a page other than the home page, I linked to it. Little metadata about the mission statement is available. It would be useful to know when it was written and by whom, and when updated and how.

Length:
Some mission statements were just one sentence, others had a bullet list or enumerated list. A few were of greater length. I used some discretion about what part of a page I excerpted as a mission statement if it was not explicitly titled. If it is explicitly titled, I included the title.

An ideal mission statement is a thorough one that includes all these elements. Some useful comparisons may be drawn from the Periodic Chart of Organizations.
http://danshaw.com/pdfs/Periodic-Table-of-Organizations.pdf

SpaceLinks

NASA Informal Education Officers for your region

http://education.nasa.gov/about/contacts/informal_page.html

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Aero Museums, Alphabetical by State:
http://www.aero.com/museums/museums.htm

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