Several relatively small museum projects in the parks required exhibit planning and preparation. Only a few involved new buildings. Two of them, at Joshua Tree and Saguaro national monuments, brought the laboratory natural history subjects as a welcome change. Other projects called for new museums in restored or rehabilitated structures such as the Clover Hill Tavern at Appomattox, a lighthouse station outbuilding at Cape Hatteras, and additional rooms in the Old Courthouse at St. Louis. These encountered difficulties typical of adaptive use but also presented their share of curatorial and conservation problems. A well-meaning park supporter at Cape Hatteras secured donations for the little Museum of the Sea with the promise that the objects would never leave the Outer Banks, an especially hazardous environment for many artifacts. The Museum Branch consequently had to persuade donors to allow their temporary removal to Washington for preservative treatment and protective mounting in the laboratory. The pending projects also included replacement of stopgap installations that did not meet Service standards at Mammoth Cave and Oconaluftee in Great Smoky Mountains. In carrying out this core program the laboratory installed seven park museums or exhibit rooms between March 1954 and April 1955 and shipped the exhibits for two more to far Southwestern areas.

Perhaps the most innovative among them was the new wing for the Chickamauga museum. Built specifically to house the Claud E. Fuller collection, the Chickamauga addition demanded the adaptation of park museum theory to an atypical situation. The collection had its greatest value as a study series. It comprised several hundred weapons and accessories selected to illustrate the development of American military firearms. A system of visible study storage would serve the primary needs of scholars and also those of interested laymen and casual visitors. The Museum Branch equipped the room with continuous runs of wall cases using factorybuilt, dust-tight extruded aluminum and plate glass construction with external lighting. It specified higher-than-usual bases to bring every specimen into convenient viewing range. Case fronts with hinges and locks provided both security and practical access when a legitimate student needed to remove a gun for closer examination. To minimize the need for this the laboratory mounted each gun so its whole length and most diagnostic parts were in plain sight. The installation kept the collection in synoptic order with individual specimen and category labels of display quality. The laboratory also supplied an examining table with padded top, special lights, measuring instruments, and a magnifying glass, but no tools that might be used to disassemble any gun parts.

While concentrating as much as possible on Park Service museum exhibits, the laboratory found it necessary to undertake additional assignments. Parks wanted graphic displays to supplement manned information desks by providing answers to common questions. The Museum Branch viewed informational displays, like those with propaganda intent, as sharply distinct from museum exhibits. The peculiar value of the latter depended on public confidence in their integrity. To avoid eroding this confidence the branch tried quite successfully to keep a degree of physical separation between museum exhibits and other types of display.

The superintendent of San Juan National Historic Site in Puerto Rico asked for help in providing orientation displays to equip a temporary visitor reception building at El Morro. He assured the Museum Branch that he could easily get the work done locally if the laboratory would provide onsite guidance. Frank Buffmire went to the park and laid out a series of attractive bilingual units that matched the superintendent's wishes. Then he discovered that the superintendent had merely assumed he could find craftsmen to carry out the designs. After an arduous search Buffmire located one carpenter whose shop was his back yard. With such meager help he got the panels constructed and painted, executed the graphics and lettering, and mounted the panels in place. While Buffmire's work assured the quality of the exhibits, the project underlined the economy and efficiency of production in the central laboratory.

A year later, in the summer of 1955, the branch cooperated on an experiment that required another set of informational displays. Parks charging entrance fees often experienced bottlenecks at their entrance stations as drivers asked questions. One proposed solution would locate an information station with adequate parking close inside the entrance. To test the idea Yellowstone placed a portable building for this purpose at its west entrance. The laboratory prepared colorful displays answering visitors' principal questions. In the end, the experiment did less to test the potential of the displays than to demonstrate the unwillingness of visitors to make a second stop so soon after entering the park.