I've got some rather strong opinions on this topic - partly because I used to work in a maritime museum, where I was in charge of the model collection. I ought to acknowledge that I've never worked in any other sort of museum; I can't speak from experience about models of aircraft, armor, cars, etc. But I'm fairly confident that the same considerations apply to them.
I fervently wish the phrase "museum-quality model" would disappear from the language. It means absolutely nothing.
In the first place, it is to some extent an oxymoron. Museums have lots of reasons for acquiring models - and only some of those reasons have anything to do with "quality" as a model builder would define the term. Suppose, for example, I'm a curator in a maritime museum and somebody offers to donate a model of the
Santa Maria that he's built. It obviously was hacked out of a single piece of oak, is ludicrously lopsided in its proportions, has sails made from fabric that's six scale inches thick, and has fittings made out of lead (which is a notoriously unstable material). I'll thank him for his thoughtfulness and find some polite way to tell him the museum doesn't want the model. But if somebody else walks in with an
identical, equally primitive model of the same ship
and can prove beyond doubt that it was built by one of Columbus's sailors, I'll recommend that the museum spend its entire acquisitions budget to acquire it.
The ship models that prisoners of war carved out of bone during the Napoleonic Wars belong fit in a similar category. The hull lines of such a model are likely to be way out of proportion. (The builder had no plans to work from, and he never saw the underwater hull of the ship.) It's probably made out of soup bones, and rigged with human hair. It doesn't really meet any definition of the term "scale model." But nobody who's ever looked at a POW model is likely to deny that a museum is the right place for it.
Upnorth is right: some awful models have found their way into museums - for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes the reasons are entirely legitimate (as in the cases I just described). In a maritime museum, a model built by a sailor to represent his ship is usually regarded as a valuable artifact - regardless of the level of accuracy or detail. I imagine aviation museums have similar ways of looking at the problem. (A crude, ill-proportioned model of a Spitfire that I carved out of a chunk of 2x4 with my pocket knife would have no place in a museum. An identical model that an RAF pilot carved as a gift for his kid during the Battle of Britain would be a valuable artifact.) The term "folk art" has been used to cover a multitude of modeling sins. And sometimes models get into museums for reasons that aren't so defensible. Not all museums have model experts on their staffs. It's entirely possible for a museum - especially a small, local one - to accept a model that a larger institution with a better-trained staff would reject, simply because the curator in the small museum didn't know any better. Or, for that matter, because the person who built the model also donated $10,000 to the museum's development fund. It's hard to say no to people like that.
Lousy models - as most members of this forum would define them - often make it into museums. The reverse is even more true: the vast majority of good models don't make it into museums. Ship modelers, in particular (I don't think the problem is quite as accute in other areas of the hobby - though I could be mistaken) too often get the notion that "if my model is good enough, a maritime museum will buy it." That scarcely ever happens.
Museums have limited budgets, and they have limited space. They have to set priorities when they decide what artifacts to collect. The joint where I used to work (the Mariners' Museum, in Newport News, Virginia) had general policy that it only collected models that were contemporary with the ships they represented. We were interested in builders' half-models, authentic "Admiralty models," POW models, sailor-built models, etc. - but not, generally speaking, scale models of old ships built by modern modelers. We made exceptions for models built by particularly outstanding, influential modelers (e.g., Harold Hahn, August Crabtree, and Donald McNarry), and in instances where we really wanted a model of a particular ship to fill a hole in an important exhibit. (We caved in to public pressure and commissioned a highly-detailed model of the
Titanic.) But under normal circumstances, if a modeler walked in the door with an exquisitely-detailed model of the
Flying Cloud that he'd built himself and offered to donate it, we'd turn it down. (We rejected modern paintings of old subjects for the same reasons.)
Few museums commission the construction of models. Again, I don't know much about fields other than ship modeling, but I'm unaware of any American maritime museum that currently commissions ship models on a regular basis. The Smithsonian used to do it - and had a formal policy regarding scale accuracy, materials (no lead, no plastic, no cotton rigging, etc.) that was written into the contract the modeler had to sign. But so far as I know the Smithsonian hasn't commissioned a ship model in at least thirty years. (Its new, permanent exhibition on American military history has scarcely any ship models in it. Most of the Smithsonian's excellent collection is now in storage. Apparently models aren't "in" among exhibit designers at the moment.) The Navy Department occasionally commissions models (usually of new ship classes), and has a similar set of standards. So far as I know, no other maritime museum does. About twenty-five years ago a ship model dealer in New England made a half-hearted attempt to establish a set of standards for ship models, and published a little booklet about them. So far as I know, no museum officially adopted that document. (The one where I worked repudiated it.)
This rant has gone on far too long; it's obviously a sore subject with me. Bottom line: upnorth is right. The term "museum quality model" is both meaningless and useless.