Museums

Research about the travel industry confirms that cultural tourism and heritage tourism are among the fastest growing segments of the international tourism industry and are powerful socioeconomic development tools for both developed and developing nations. These forms of tourism are directed toward experiencing the arts, heritage, and activities that represent the stories and people of the past and present. Museums, by simple virtue of living out their mission—the accumulation, preservation, research, and exhibition of generations of cultural experience and humanitarian traditions of humankind, coded in artifacts and other objects and activities of human heritage—become relevant spaces for tourists seeking connection and engagement with human cultures of the past and the present.

Through their work, museums have not only succeeded in expanding markets and connecting people, they ...