Lynda:

This concept was central to Georges-Henri Riviere's mould-breaking Musee
des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris nearly 30 years ago, and the
original lower level open access storage is only now being re-thought and
re-organised.

Another example is the Metropolitan in New York which has virtually all of
its American collections on display.  The pieces that are not in either
the set piece historic room reconstructions or in the thematic primary
galleries are in visible storage in an upper area - supported by a
computer database on the whole American dept. collection wherever it is in
the museum in the visible storage area.

I do not know whether these two have been rresearched but my subjective
experience as a many times visitor to these two is that the visible
storage/display areas are rarely if ever empty.  On the contrary the
growing number of collections-rich study centres in museums of many kinds
(eg. Liverpool Museum or the York Archaeological Resource Centre in
England, or the Native American collections in the Boston Children's
Museum - and the great number of subsequent imitators of these - suggest
that someone thinks putting much of the collectio out where it can be
dipped into by visitors (literally in the case of collections in pull-out
drawers - back to the 19th century!) is working.

Patrick Boylan