Fort Vancouver National Historic Site

At Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service, park management saw an opportunity to transform a former aircraft maintenance building into a high quality collection storage facility. Recognizing that many other National Park units in the region lacked access to museum-quality storage, Fort Vancouver sought to find ways to cooperatively finance the operation of the facility with other parks to defray some of their construction costs and support long-term operating expenses. The park needed to understand both the feasibility of the proposed model and review what a business plan might look like to feel confident in moving forward with the project.

Knowing both the scale and diversity of collections management within the National Park Service (collectively over 400 units and more than 175 million collection items), Museum Insights began with an extensive study of other National Park Service centralized collection facilities and private art storage companies. Based on this work, we developed a variety of operational profiles that were working in the field and were responsive to unique local conditions. We then closely reviewed Fort Vancouver's local conditions and the needs of their probable cooperators. While this review determined that the model Fort Vancouver initially proposed was unlikely to succeed, we provided several recommendations for alternative pathways to help balance the costs of developing and operating the facility.