ABSTRACT
Opportunities for museums to leverage in-house knowledge exist in the form of environmental consultants and professional trainers. Attendance at the world's top twelve natural history museums in 2015 was just shy of thirty-five million visits, giving impetus to fresh thinking surrounding the monetizing of collections, for example, through sales of imagery, merchandising, and knowledge-based products and services. This chapter is devoted to grappling with these challenges and opportunities in the years ahead. Much of the literature available on the topic comes from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The fact that it rings true in 2017 is testament both to the universality of these ideas and the fact that so few natural history museums with important exceptions have embraced best practice. While regional differences are important—China, for instance, opens about two hundred new museums each year, for a total of almost five thousand museums nationally—the global context over the last decade has been one of the successively diminishing resources.
