No, there is nothing about "non-profit" in the dictionary definition of
"museum," and for good reason. A for-profit corporate museum or a
private museum is no less a museum. If a public, non-profit museum had
to be sold to a private corporation due to dire financial necessity and
as the only available means to preserve a collection--a not too bizarre
a scenario in these times, I should think--would the institution
suddenly cease to be a museum? I don't think that would make much sense.
What would you call it? It's safer to simply describe "for-profit" and
"non-profit" as subsets of the wordd museum, even if one type is much
more conventional than the other.
     AAM has every right to "define" its terms of membership and the
type of institutions it will concern itself with. One can always place
an ad hoc restriction in a document and say something like "For the
purposes of this charter, a museum shall be defined as a non-profit
institution which...blah, blah, blah." Perhaps AAM's language in fact
reads something like that; I don't know, but perhaps someone who does
could respond. But I don't think AAM or any other museum organization
has a right to modify an existing definition of a word: that's a recipe
for confusion and misunderstanding. The meanings of words will evolve on
their own without any individual or organization assuming dictatorial
powers and upsetting our linguistic applecarts. The leaders of any
discipline are consulted by compilers of new dictionaries and will
influence revisions and additions if needed. But I would hope that any
such narrowing of the definition of a museum would be offered as an
ADDITIONAL definition in any authoritative dictionary--not just to
supplant the current definitions--as in the form of "especially or
primarily a public, not-for-profit institution which..." It isn't fair
or reasonable to change the definition of a noun and apply new standards
retractively to older examples which were called by that name and
thereby disqualify them because they don't fit the new definition.
Arbitrary, prescriptive changes in the meaning of words by self-styled
language dictators do not necessarily help anyone communicate more
effectively. In fact, deliberately accelerating the pace of linguistic
change just makes history harder to decipher and decode. It seems to me
that museum professionals--generally historians of one sort or
another--have some investment in stable terminology and should have an
interest in preserving descriptive terminology inviolate for as long as
possible. As new situations, new concepts, and new objects arise, invent
new names for them; as the old ones evolve, subdivide, and proliferate,
assign new names to the specialized subsets, but why disturb the name or
meaning of the original term?
     More and more people want to impose restrictions, limitations, and
conditions on the notion of a museum before they're willing to call it a
museum (still others want to expand the notion and insist that virtually
anything that has educational value is a museum). To say that only a
non-profit institution can qualify as a museum would be analogous to
saying that a Model T Ford was not an automobile because it didn't have
modern emission controls. --David Haberstich