Core Documents Verification revolves around the evaluation of five core documents against a set of required elements. Completion of the program provides public confirmation that an institution has an educational mission and the policies and procedures in place that reflect standard practices of professional museums, as articulated in the Core Standards and used in the Accreditation Program.

The expectation is for your documents to be verifiable at the initial review, but it is rare for all five documents to pass Core Documents Verification right away-evaluation and revision take time. We strongly recommend starting this program 6 to 9 months prior to any Accreditation application deadline the museum intends to meet.

Application

1. Have your finalized and approved core documents ready to upload and your credit card information at hand.
2. Log in. If you do not already have an AAM profile, you will be required to create one. Be sure to link your profile to your museum/organization. Select it from a list under “Organization Name” under Employer Information.
3. Open and complete the Application.
   • Step 1: Provide basic contact and information about your institution. Any information previously provided to the Alliance will appear here. Please update as needed.
   • Step 2: Upload your Core Documents, provide their respective approval dates, and answer the question about the development of each. Note: you must upload the mission statement and at least one other Core Document in order to complete the application.
   • If your museum owns or manages collections you must answer question 10, regardless of whether or not you are submitting the Collections Management Policy at the time of application.
4. Read and agree to the terms and conditions for program participation.
5. Provide credit card information and submit the application. You will be provided with an Order Confirmation that serves as your receipt.

Technical notes:

• The application will time out in 20 minutes. It must be completed in one sitting; you are not able save your work and return to it later.

• If you find you are not ready to submit the application, you can cancel and exit the application at any time. However, you cannot save your work.

• When in the application, you can return to the previous step or jump ahead to the next one using the buttons on the bottom of each page.

• Do not use your browser’s back/forward buttons or refresh feature. You will lose the data you have entered.

• You may upload more than one file per Core Document if applicable. Acceptable document formats include Word (.doc/docx), Excel (.xls/xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt/pptx), Rich Text Format (.rtf), and PDF (.pdf).

• We suggest converting PowerPoints into PDFs to reduce the file size.

• If you get a security notice that only secure content is being displayed, do NOT click “show all content.” If you do, you will be forced to refresh your browser and will lose data already entered. Either ignore the notice or click the X to close the security warning dialogue window or notice bar.