Accounting for heritage: a structured literature review

This article improves our understanding of how research has progressed since 1991 on accounting for cultural, heritage, and scientific collections of public, not-for-profit museums, galleries, and other repositories. The accounting standard setters propose assigning monetary values to these collections for financial reporting. The authors identify alternative approaches or dimensions that may require further exploration. A rigorous structured literature review (SLR) was conducted, following the steps outlined in earlier prominent SLR studies. The results suggest that the organized accounting profession, through the activities and proposals of public sector accounting standard-setting agencies, remains largely unaffected by the depth and breadth of the opposition to these proposals to assign monetary values on ‘priceless collections’.