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