IUMAA Strategic Plan Priorities
Strategic Plan Priority One: Openness
Create a welcoming space with opportunities for audiences to engage with the work of the museum.
The IUMAA holds in public trust cultural, historical, ethnographic, and ethnological artifacts of people of the world, and serves as stewards and interpreters of these legacies. As a museum and public trust institution, we are obligated and committed to ensure all audiences are invited, welcomed, and encouraged to engage with their heritage and that of additional cultures from around the world. To facilitate this, we strive to provide visitors with an understanding of the institution that houses this material culture.
Strategies and Objectives of Openness
Strategic Plan Priority Two: Communication
Increase visibility of museum and its collections and research. Maintain, enhance, and expand ongoing conversations with supporters and visitors via multiple platforms.
Communications, utilizing a wide away of tools and channels, enables the museum to inform and educate audiences regarding its collections, programs, exhibits, research, and other services. It also serves as a means to develop and cultivate donors and partners. In most cases, communication activities (including marketing) provide the first contact between the institution and its public.
Strategies and Objectives of Communication
Strategic Plan Priority Three: Education
Support both the IUMAA and IU missions through the presentation of scholarly research via tours, curriculum-based opportunities, student training, programs, and exhibitions.
Education is a critical function in the museum and is rooted in all other aspects of the museum’s work. The acquisition and stewardship of objects enables knowledge creation and sharing with all audiences and enables us to learn from those audiences as well. Research enhances our knowledge and the richness and depth of content available for program and exhibit development. And exhibitions, programs, tours, teaching, and online services provide mediums for sharing content and facilitating learning. Additionally, the unique nature of the academic museum enables us to train and prepare next generation researchers, museum scholars, and museum professionals.
Strategies and Objectives of Education
Strategic Plan Priority Four: Research
Conduct and facilitate research with archaeological and ethnographic collections, as well as in museum studies and educational practices, and share findings.
Material culture research enhances our understanding of our collections and broadens artifact or object use in public-facing programs and exhibitions while adding to our knowledge of the people who made and used the artifacts. Fieldwork research also enables us to undertake study beyond our collections and our four walls. Museum and educational practices research provides us an opportunity to contribute to our fields of practice while extending the museum and the university’s impact beyond campus-based activities
Strategies and Priorities of Research
Strategic Plan Priority Five: Preservation
Observe best practices in every aspect of collections curation.
Preservation of the collections is a core function of the museum but goes beyond the care of the physical objects themselves. Diligent record keeping and documentation, attention to legal and ethical concerns, acknowledgement of problems and issues related to past actions and interpretations are all of part the act of preservation—of the objects and the knowledge they contain. Given the nature of the public trust and best practices, the highest benchmarks in professional museum practice must be maintained.
Strategies and Objectives of Preservation
Strategic Plan Priority Six: Collaboration
Engage with other institutions and entities through partnerships focused on shared goals.
Collaboration enables the museum to broaden its outreach to audiences and provide greater access to its collections, research, exhibits, and programs. Working with partnering organizations in Central and South America will lead to an understanding of influence and contact between societies separated by time and space. Working with groups across a wide range of disciplines will create opportunities for descendant communities and culturally affiliated audiences to be more engaged and directly participate in the museum’s work.
Strategies and Objectives of Collaboration
Strategic Plan Priority Seven: Support
Responsibly plan for financial security
Expanding funding for the IUMAA is critical to the museum’s financial security and its goals. As a new institution born in difficult times, it is imperative that the museum seek new funding sources within and outside of the university in order to ensure the institution and its goals can be achieved.
Strategies and Objectives of Support
Strategic Plan Priority Eight: Professionalism
Conduct all museum activities ethically, creatively, thoughtfully, using highest standards.
IUMAA stands as a public-facing institution representing Indiana University and the IUB campus to visitors from around the world. To that end, the museum is committed to maintaining the highest level of professional and academic standards in its work. Additionally, as a public trust institution, the museum is also committed to maintain legal requirements of statutory law and ethical standards set forth by a number of professional and academic organizations and entities.
Strategies and Objectives of Professionalism
