The Institute of Museum Ethics mission is threefold:
- To promote accountability, transparency and social responsibility in the museum
- To foreground museum ethics as one of the most pivotal issues to museum professionals in the twenty first century
- To create a physical and virtual community of emerging and practicing museum professionals and museum studies faculty who use our resources to make informed decisions about ethical issues.
Defining Museum Ethics
- The IME holds that museum ethics concerns all areas of museum work from governance to education, registration to exhibitions, since ethical dilemmas occur in all departments and each can work for the common good.
- The IME defines museum ethics both through larger ethical principles, such as integrity, which remain relatively constant and through applied ethics, for example, digital ethics in museums, which shifts over time as the needs of society change. We aim to provide museum professionals and emerging professionals the tools to identify operative ethical principles and to evaluate and revise applied ethics individually and as a community.
- The IME also defines museum ethics through the larger discourse that considers how the museum encourages social understanding and promotes human rights. Museum practitioners and theorists are exploring how institutions can use the past to address present concerns, facilitate dialogue among diverse groups, and empower marginalized communities, locally and globally.
- Whether seen in terms of day-to-day decision-making or forging an overarching socially conscious mission, museum ethics is about an institution’s relationship with its public(s).
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