ABSTRACT

What is a museum? Though seemingly obvious, the answer to this question has eluded the international museum sector since a controversial redraft of the official definition, put forward by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2019, was dramatically rejected by its own membership. As deliberations about what constitutes a museum continue ahead of ICOM’s next General Conference in 2022, this article provides a quantitative content analysis of 269 definition proposals submitted by ICOM’s international membership during the 2019 consultation phase, in order to evaluate how closely the wording of the eventual proposed definition mirrored the priorities of ICOM’s stakeholder base. The research finds that contributors favoured the content of the standing ICOM definition over terms and concepts that characterised the proposed revision. In the light of these findings, the article proposes ways in which ICOM can improve its consultation processes in order to more faithfully gauge the perspectives of its constituents ahead of the 2022 conference.