Stephanie - 

Good responses so far. Anything Dave says is good advice. 

My 2 cents:
 - Ignore commercial gun safes. For the reason Dave mentioned as well as the fact they are unitaskers - built for one job for one audience. They are great for some people to hold their personal arms but I would not use them for a museum collection. 

 - Standard museum cabinetry should suffice. Unless you plan to receive a large number (50+) of long arms, there should be little need to get a dedicated cabinet with an internal gun rack. Heck, I don't even like storing them vertically. My preference is to lay them down over a sandwich of quilting and poly batting in 4" drawers (or whatever size you need). Anything short of longer rifles/light machine guns will normally fit in a 40" wide drawer/shelf. This preference is partially due to economy of space. You can fit many more longarms in drawers in a 7'x3.5'x2.5' cabinet than you can in vertical racks in a similar space. 

For handguns, I would go with partitioned/padded drawers or maybe going so far as to carve outlines in ethafoam (routers are great for this) for storage. 

For right now, as we develop the collection at the US Marshals Museum (construction is still 16 months out, opening September 2019), I am using foam-lined shelves for handguns and a scratch-built modification of a baker's rack to store longarms (A presentation of what I built: https://goo.gl/lzLwNI). It's not elegant, but it works for our current needs while not requiring me to lay out $3000 for a cabinet that will not match everything else we end up buying. 

We are already looking at permanent storage using compactor shelves. The intention is to store arms in a drawered cabinet similar to what I described above on a unit of the compactors. 

That may have been more than two cents. 

Good luck! 
Dave K.

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