ROCKLAND – The Maine Lighthouse Museum is pulling a switch.

By summer, the interior of its relatively new home at One Park Drive will have a different layout where visitors enter the building that spotlights its “partner” museums, as well as its first-class lighthouse collection.

Now, the Lighthouse Depot store is what visitors see when they enter the museum. The shift will move the popular lighthouse merchandise away from a bank of windows that overlook Rockland Harbor and the breakwater lighthouse.

In its place will be partner museum exhibits, showing visitors what other cultural gems the midcoast has to offer. The tentative name is: “Discovery Center.”

Moving the store will open a vista of the harbor now obstructed by the merchandise, Ted Panayotoff, museum volunteer coordinator, said Friday.

The majority of the existing lighthouse and American maritime history exhibits, as well as a treasure trove of artifacts stowed in boxes, will move to a 5,000-square-foot exhibit room that now being renovated.

The partners participating in the Discovery Center are: The Farnsworth Art Museum, Island Institute, Rockland Historical Society, Owls Head Transportation Museum, Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Rockland-Thomaston Area Chamber of Commerce and Maine Lobster Festival.

Montpelier-Gen. Henry Knox Museum in Thomaston also may join the group, Panayotoff of Camden said.

The goal is for collection pieces exhibited at the Discovery Center to lure visitors to their points of origin.

The Maine Lighthouse Museum has come a long way since founder Ken Black started it single-handedly in the early 1970s. Black, a former U.S. Coast Guard warrant officer, began collecting lighthouse and Coast Guard artifacts. He soon founded the museum at the old Coast Guard station on the pier. When the Bird Block opened – where the station is now located – the museum moved to the Grand Army of the Republic building on Limerock Street. A few years ago, the city sold that building.

Scores of volunteers celebrated the fruit of their labor last June with the opening of the new museum.

But the fundraising and volunteer work is far from over.

“We’re always short of volunteers,” Panayotoff said, whether it be carpenters, painters or electricians for renovation work, docents and curators or administrative assistants. “There are no employees for the museum.”

Two volunteers, Joe and Anne Lebherz of Friendship, are working “below deck” in the basement, sorting through boxes of books to establish a top-notch reference library near the main lighthouse exhibit area.

Recently, Panayotoff dug out and dusted off a retirement scrapbook presented in 1939 to Commissioner Harold Davis King, who was head of the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Lighthouses in Review. That was the year the U.S. Coast Guard took over the responsibility for lighthouses from the U.S. Lighthouse Service, he noted.

The reference-only library is “going to start off with just Maine lighthouses,” Joe Lebherz said. Later, the maritime research material will include the U.S. Revenue Service, U.S. Lighthouse Service, U.S. Lifesaving Service and modern day Coast Guard lighthouse history.

The library will be complete with a computer hooked to the Internet for research, Panayotoff said.

A working “lighthouse depot” will have its own spot in the museum, next to the library.

Panayotoff envisions visitors getting a firsthand look at how lighthouse lenses and mechanisms were repaired. Since the view from the shop window is the back of buildings, plans call for a scenic window cover.

A second order Fresnel lens will be the centerpiece of the massive exhibit room. The valuable lens from Petit Manan Light, with an estimated worth of $800,000, is still in crates waiting to be reassembled by professionals and volunteers.

Many artifacts from ships bells and whistles to fog horns, rope fenders and brass oil cans are sitting on shelves in the basement waiting to be cleaned and displayed in the expanded museum.

It takes loads of volunteers to build this gateway on Penobscot Bay and tons of money, too.

The first phase of the project cost about $1 million, board member Gordon Page Sr. said Saturday. Recently, the museum solicited by mail for local donations with a goal of gathering $500,000 for phase two.

“We are still far away from where we need to be,” Page said.

Anyone who wants to make monetary donations, volunteer labor or to volunteer in museum operations should contact Panayotoff at 236-9096. For further information about the museum visit the Web site at www.mainelight

housemuseum.com.