Its new system is called Rapid Response Collecting, and it will speed up the pace at which the museum engages with important developments and issues that shape art, design, architecture and technology and make the headlines.
While museums engage in high-profile performance initiatives and debates, the dance world continues its method of preservation in the same quiet, humble way it has for decades, through a more mobile sort of archive: the body.
Three museums engage actively in contemporary art: LACMA, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, or MOCA, which opened in 1983 and mobilized big-time support from artists (who gave important works) and billionaire collectors, such as Eli Broad and the late Marcia Weisman, Norton Simon's sister.
The museum engages in many research and conservation projects relating to desert ecology and particularly to the Sonoran Desert.
On his desk is a big-screen iMac computer displaying a project the museum is engaged in under a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, a database known as the MorphoBank.
"We wanted to honor the tree," Ms. Dixon said, so the museum has engaged an artists' collective, the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, to rework the wood from the tree into benches, sculptures or other amenities in the museum.
"Sometimes we feel we are fighting a war we have already lost," said Manus Brinkman, secretary general of the International Council of Museums in Paris, one of many museum officials engaged in current recovery efforts.
Instead of having a single ensemble work its way through the set, the museum has engaged six ensembles, each to play a program drawing on music from different periods in Beethoven's life.
Bill Sainsbury, marketing manager at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, said: "Each one of the museums is engaged in telling the story of the last major naval war of the 20th century from our unique perspectives.
