The Business of Museums | Harvard University

Museums, in addition to being repositories for scholarly, educational, and cultural stewardship functions, are businesses, and the astute museum professional benefits from understanding how they operate and how they are structured. This course teaches the basic business of museums, large and small, and provides instruction so that museum professionals can operate in the most efficient manner possible. The course is designed to be enlightening to current or prospective staff in all functional areas within a museum, as every department contributes to operations either directly or indirectly. Though there are discussions that introduce basic financial concepts, this is not a finance course. Rather, this course provides history, theory, and practical management considerations for museums operating in today's environment.