LEWISTON – Rachel Desgrosseilliers will be showing some of the East Coast’s biggest museums a thing or two about planning for their future.

“I’m there to show that no matter your size, the process to successfully plan for your museum’s future is the same,” she said.

Desgrosseiller, of the Museum LA in the Bates Mill, is sitting on a panel Thursday morning at the Building Museums Conference in Washington, D.C., about balancing programming with budgets. She’ll be joined by a museum planner and a coordinator of the planned Museum of the Academy of Motion Pictures.

“They wanted to show the scale, from a small museum in Maine to a huge museum devoted to Academy Award winners,” Desgrosseilliers said.

The conference is being sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. It runs through March 1.

It’s been a busy year for the little museum tucked away in a corner of Bates Mill. It’s completing the run of a popular special exhibit, Portraits and Voices: Mill workers of Seven Mills. It featured pictures and displays about the people responsible for creating the area’s industrial heritage combined with recorded interviews.

That display ends its run at the end of March and a new traveling display on mill workers’ lives debuts in May. It will begin traveling to venues in New England and Canada – and possibly Washington, D.C. – in August.

The museum is also finishing work on a master plan and looking for a more permanent home. Museum members are concentrating on two possibilities: staying in the Bates Mill or moving to the old Camden Yarn Mill near Railroad Park. The library has an option on that property that expires at the end of 2008.

“We thought it was important that we stay downtown, but also that we occupy a mill building,” Desgrosseilliers said.

It’s the master plan that brought Museum LA to the attention of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, sponsors of the Building Museums conference.

“We are a fairly new museum, in the grand scheme of things,” Desgrosseilliers said. “We tend to be more open, more future-thinking.”