Presented in an easily digestible format, this go-to desktop reference guide provides explanations and clarifications on a variety of issues and concerns facing today's museum professional, including: *Intellectual property issues, including copyright, trademark, service marks, and fair use *Corporate issues, including non-profit status and tax exempt status *Governance issues, including trustees and fiduciary duties A Legal Dictionary for Museum Professionals features three major sections: *In the first, ten common acronyms and symbols are explained. *In the second, more than 100 terms such as abandoned property, automatic revocation, charitable trust, conflict of interest, declatory judgment, doctrine of equitable deviation, fiduciary duty, nondistribution constraint, partial gift, quid pro quo contribution, and unrelated business income tax are concisely defined specifically in the context of their relevance to day-to-day museum work. *In the final section, ten additional topics are broken out into a more in-depth explanation, allowing the subtleties and complications to be examined and explained in a plain-language manner. These include ethics and the law, licensing, trademark, The Business Judgment Rule, and Non-Profit Organizations and Tax Exemption. Written by a museum director who holds a law degree and has practiced law, this reference book is intended to be kept within arm's reach at a desk and be the first stop for a professional when a question arises.

Author Biography

Heather Hope Kuruvilla is a museum professional with special interests in the areas of intellectual property and rights management, museum administration, board fiduciary responsibility, and the ethical and thoughtful approach to necessary deaccessioning. She studied museum registration methods at Seton Hall University, where she was awarded a Master of Arts with Distinction. She holds a Certificate in Intellectual Property: Art & Museum Law, which she attained while working towards her Juris Doctor at DePaul University College of Law. Her past research interests have included the intersection of ethics and the law in museum deaccessioning and the impact of the Visual Artists Rights Act on American museums, and her seminar article on deaccessioning was awarded honorable mention in the 2011 Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation student writing competition. She presented a paper on ethics and the law in relation to museums at the 2009 "New Directions in Museum Ethics" conference.