The Effective Museum

John W. Jacobsen led museum analysis and planning for White Oak Associates, Inc. for over forty years and over a hundred museums through hundreds of commissions. Projects include eighteen museums representing over a billion dollars of actual and anticipated investment in new and expanding museums internationally. In the Eighties, he was associate director of the Museum of Science in Boston. In 1988, the Museum served 2.2 million visitors, an unsurpassed record. White Oak integrated operating economics with creative concepts in its plans. Mr. Jacobsen's BA and MFA are from Yale University. Long committed to the museum field, Jacobsen is the founder of the Museum Film Network ('85), the Planetarium Show Network ('88), the Ocean Film Network ('92), AAM's Professional Committee on Green Museums (PIC Green '08) and of the Digital Immersive Giant Screen Specifications (DIGSS 1.0 '11). With Ms. Jeanie Stahl, Mr. Jacobsen formed the White Oak Institute in 2007, a non-profit dedicated to research-based museum innovation, with completed awards and contracts with the NSF, the IMLS, the AAM and the ACM to develop field-wide standards and data collection fields. Mr. Jacobsen’s extensive writings and presentations on museum topics have appeared in Curator, Museum Management and Curatorship, Informal Learning Review and at AAM, ASTC, ACM and other conferences. He is the author of Measuring Museum Impact and Performance (2016) and editor and co-author of The Museum Manager’s Compendium (2017), both published by Rowman & Littlefield.