If I am visiting a small local museum, I certainly don't expect it to have either the budget or the space et cetera of a large museum. Many of the curators are part time and more maintenance folk than actual curators. This is not meant as a slur against curators - many of them are very knowledgeable about their local history - however - you should not really expect them to be. Most have had no formal training in preservation of archival materials, displaying of artifacts and so on.
Because they have such limited resources to work with, you can expect many of the displays to be permanent. And dusty. The artifacts themselves are usually donated by local people. Since most of the people involved with the museum have no restorative knowledge, the items must go on display as is.
Bearing all this in mind, I still enjoy looking through small town and quaint museums. They often have old photos of interest that cannot be found elsewhere. And the emphasis is on local history cannot be beat.
Large museums however are a different story. Because they must attract dollars from outside of their city or state, they often must go far afield for interesting artifacts. Neither can they count on private donations to fill up exhibits. When those exhibits are purchased, they must be heavily advertised so they pay their way. After they have a season or two at the museum, the staff try to send it on the road to be exhibited by other museums for a price.
I especially enjoy jewellery collections. Quilt exhibits too. As part of a permanent collection, I especially enjoy pottery collections, timelines and comparison studies of various peoples in the world at the same time.
The Victorian era is one of my favorite. So any museum that takes an aspect of Victorian life for an exhibit is likely to get my attention. I also enjoy discovering what children used to play with as well as how folks went about their everday lives - what they ate, wore, their homes and rituals and so on.
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