Collections lie at the heart of most museums, so naturally, values regarding the ownership and control of collections are central to museum ethics. Recent developments at the global, national, and institutional level—including a wave of voluntary repatriation to descendant communities—suggest we may be at a tipping point regarding those values. In 2023, AAM launched the Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations project to explore where these changes may lead us in decades to come. But to benchmark the progress of our sector, and identify barriers to bringing our practices into alignment with contemporary values, we need data. Today on the blog, Soleil Hawley and Kayla Kane of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology announce the launch of a new survey designed to collect that information.

Yours from the future,

Elizabeth Merritt, Vice President, Strategic Foresight, and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums

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Provenance and cultural property ownership are among the most pressing topics in the museum field, intersecting with nearly every collecting decision—how museums acquire, borrow, deaccession, and return objects. These choices shape how cultural heritage is protected and accessed, but the field has never had a comprehensive picture of how they are made.

Now, the National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices aims to change that. It asks: Who signs off on acquisitions, and who has veto power? How are institutions staffing and prioritizing provenance research? What types of ownership resolutions have they reached, and what drives those decisions? What events have reshaped museum collecting practices in recent years?

The National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices

Last week, the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology launched the National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices to examine the practices and policies governing acquisitions, loans, and deaccessions. It also covers recent ownership resolutions and current provenance research activity—emerging priorities that U.S. museums are navigating with limited field-wide data.

The survey forms part of the Museums: Missions and Acquisitions (M2A) Project, launched in 2024 to study collecting practices and policies at U.S. museums. The project documents our present inflection point in museum collecting, driven in large part by growing attention to its relationship with communities and countries of origin. The results will make it possible to track how museum collecting practices evolve in the years ahead.

Funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS MG-255529-OMS-24), the survey advances IMLS’s mandate to support data collection, analysis, evaluation, and dissemination of information to extend and improve the nation’s museum and library services.

How to Participate

The survey is open to any U.S.-based, nonprofit institution that collects or stewards cultural objects and self-identifies as a museum, library, or other collection. Each institution’s leadership should designate someone to coordinate the institution’s response and enter the data into the survey form.

The survey is hosted online through Qualtrics and is accessible via a single open link. Any authorized representative at an eligible collecting institution can open the link, complete the eligibility screening, and begin responding.

The survey includes a save-and-continue feature allowing respondents to complete it in multiple sittings. Respondents who pass the eligibility screening will be able to download an Excel spreadsheet containing the full questionnaire and space to collect answers. A copy of the questionnaire is also available upon request.

Why Now?

High-profile repatriations, ongoing ownership claims, and escalating threats to cultural heritage around the world have brought the legal, ethical, and reputational implications of museum collecting into mainstream conversation. The National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices contributes to conversations that American Alliance of Museums (AAM) members are already having about collections stewardship, provenance, restitution, and repatriation. AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums’ Voluntary Repatriation, Restitution, and Reparations project used forecasting techniques to envision the future of ethical collections stewardship and reparative practice in U.S. museums. A clearer picture of institutions’ recent collecting activities, current decision-making structures, and ongoing capacities and needs would advance the discussions already underway within and outside the museum field.

What Makes This Survey Different from Other Museum Surveys?

Professional associations such as AAM, Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), and Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) regularly collect data to understand the activities and needs of their member institutions. State-of-the-art museum surveys by Ithaka S+R have examined topics such as museum staff demographics and the challenges and strategies of museum leadership. But the practices and policies governing how museums build and steward their collections have never been systematically examined.

The National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices is a first attempt to do so. The survey addresses the full lifecycle of collections—from acquisition through deaccessioning—and collects parallel data on incoming loans to understand their roles relative to acquisitions. It also examines how museums resolve ownership questions and conduct provenance research, both voluntarily and as required by law.

The survey consolidates information currently spread across institutional policies, reports, and internal knowledge systems into a single, publicly accessible resource. Its results will not sit with a single institution. We will publish summary findings in a report in 2027, and the full de-identified results will be made available through University of Pennsylvania’s open-access institutional repository.

By aggregating this data from collecting institutions nationwide, the survey will provide a comprehensive picture of how museums’ policies and practices intersect with current questions about cultural heritage ownership, the ongoing role of acquiring objects, and the state of the field of provenance research.

What Topics Does the Survey Cover?

The survey addresses how institutions collect and steward cultural objects, broadly defined for this survey as any tangible product of human culture or activity. It covers institutional profiles, collections policies, acquisitions, incoming loans, deaccessions, ownership resolutions, and provenance research.

Many questions can be answered from memory by someone knowledgeable about an institution’s collecting operations. Questions that request data from a recent period allow institutions to define a precise date range that aligns with their annual reporting cycle or facilitates querying their collections database.

The Intended Impact

The National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices will provide a roadmap for resource allocation, investment, and data-driven decision-making in U.S. museums. The report and de-identified results will give collecting institutions and their supporters a shared evidence base on a range of collecting issues for the first time. Insights from the survey will identify areas of strength and variation, highlight needs related to funding and staffing, and inform future guidelines, philanthropy, grantmaking, and professional development.

The last national collections-related survey assessing the state and needs of U.S. museums was the Heritage Health Index, first conducted in 2004, with a follow-on survey in 2014. The initial survey, completed by 3,370 institutions, found that 190 million artifacts were in immediate need of conservation care and that 80% of collecting institutions had no emergency plan to protect their collections. The results catalyzed IMLS’s Connecting to Collections (C2C) initiative, which awarded more than 60 grants for statewide collaboration on collections care and provided 107 conservation grants to museums, libraries, and archives through a partnership with the Bank of America Foundation. C2C grants were awarded across 57 U.S. states and territories to create plans based on the Heritage Health Index’s recommendations.

The more recent Sarr-Savoy report on The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics (2018) offers a similar example of how a cross-institutional collections-related study can inform policy and mobilize resources. It was commissioned by France’s President Emmanuel Macron to evaluate the provenance of African cultural heritage held in French public collections and explore potential paths to restitution. The report recommended a three-phased restitution process including the return of long-requested pieces, legislative measures, inventorying applicable collections, sharing of digitized data, bilateral workshops, and acceptance of restitution requests on an ongoing basis. Its publication spurred private funding commitments and a dedicated Franco-German fund for provenance research on cultural objects from Sub-Saharan Africa. Earlier this month, France passed a new law reforming the inalienability principle to facilitate restitution of objects acquired between 1815 and 1972 through “theft, pillage, or gifts obtained by coercion or violence.”

Following in the footsteps of major collections-related studies that have informed policy, practice, and funding priorities, the National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices aims to do the same for collecting institutions in the United States. Its results will give museum administrators and collections professionals the evidence they need to inform their policies, secure funding, and contextualize their needs to leadership and external stakeholders.

Our Ask

If your institution collects or stewards cultural objects, and especially if any of the topics discussed here resonate with your experience, we encourage your institution to participate. Your participation helps ensure that institutions of your type and size are represented in the results.

While the survey must be completed by an institution’s leadership or their designee, anyone at a collecting institution can advocate for participation. Please bring it to the attention of your directors, volunteer to coordinate your institution’s response, or share this post with your professional networks.

We Are Here to Help

You can find more information on the Penn Cultural Heritage Center’s website and on the survey’s landing page.

We are available to answer questions and provide support throughout the completion process. Contact NSMCP@PennMuseum.org for assistance.

This project is made possible, in part, by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (MG-255529-OMS-24). The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.