Many belong to the International Congress of Maritime Museums, which coordinates members' efforts to acquire, preserve, and display their material.
[1] At 80 acres (32 ha) the Chatham Historic Dockyard in Kent, UK can lay claim to being the largest maritime museum in the world, incorporating numerous dockyard buildings, including a 1/4 mile long ropewalk, spinning rooms, covered slips, dry docks, smithery, sail loft, rigging house, mould loft, church, as well as three historic warships, it is the best preserved dockyard from the Age of Sail.
However, the UK's National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is also a contender, with many items of great historical significance, such as the actual uniform worn by Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar.
A recent activity of maritime museums is to build replicas of ships, since there are few survivors that have not already been restored and put on display.
Another is operating a museum harbour, most notably in Germany and the Netherlands but elsewhere too, that offers mooring to privately owned historical vessels, which can be watched but not boarded.