MCN 2026

What does it mean to build museum digital experiences and storytelling with a community, rather than for one?

Digital storytelling in museums has long promised connection to audiences, to communities, to collections. But too often digital becomes a delivery mechanism for the museum's existing narrative. This panel argues for something harder and more necessary. Museums are experiencing a paradigm shift; audiences have more choices, more skepticism, and less patience for institutional voice, and polarizing political and social challenges have directly impacted and had a chilling effect on the field’s efforts to address whose stories are being told. This panel looks at how three museums across the country respond using digital storytelling, challenging the power balance between audiences and museums, and addressing how and where audiences and media take up space within the museum. 

These projects aim to decenter the museum’s perspective and prioritize stories and experiences that don’t orbit the object, the canon, or the curatorial imperative, but instead emerge from lived experience. They are not just a way to deliver interpretation, but show new ways to listen first, follow the lead of communities, and truly build trust that leads to shared authorship.

The MFA Boston's reimagined 18th-century galleries, opening June 2026 in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of American Independence, feature an immersive, multi-layered in-gallery audio experience designed in close collaboration with a community advisory group. 

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's A Frame of Mind podcast, uses the museum's collection as a lens to examine belonging, identity, race, and community memory, using audio storytelling to be genuinely accountable to a moment and to its city.

The Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum’s video roundtable featuring Jewish and Christian spiritual leaders and thinkers welcomes visitors to the exhibition "The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt". It models a way to explore the continued relevance of the biblical story of Esther here and now, when Jewish communities in the US are fractured and Esther has become a tool of Christian nationalism.

These digital experiences engage community members as co-authors: shaping both story frameworks and the experience design. Together they ask: what does building trust and connection actually require? How do we know when it's working, not by our metrics, but by theirs? And how do we build digital experiences that translate something true about a community's relationship to culture, history, and place?

These questions sit at the core of what digital storytelling is trying to do and what has become increasingly challenging in the wake of the current political climate. Together, the panelists will explore the structural, editorial, and ethical choices that make community-driven digital storytelling and experience design work, and where the gaps, tensions, and open questions still live.

Museums are increasingly experimenting with AI-driven interpretation tools, but what are the possibilities for the museum itself becoming a public laboratory for testing how visitors interact with AI?

At the MIT Museum, one of our strategic goals is to become a public lab for MIT. We have been developing and studying multiple approaches to conversational and embodied AI interpretation, including:

•               A multilingual AI-powered gallery guide

•               DebunkBot, an exhibit exploring misinformation and trust

•               An AI-enabled robotic docent and wayfinding experience based on Jibo technology

These projects explore how different forms of AI — handheld, embedded within exhibits, or physically present in gallery spaces — shape visitor inquiry, engagement, trust, and learning.

This interactive session invites participants to examine three distinct AI interpretation models and discuss questions such as:

•               Do visitors trust AI differently inside museums?

•               Can museums use AI to help visitors think critically about AI itself?

•               What forms of AI best support curiosity, accessibility, and conversation?

•               How can museums ethically conduct live visitor-centered AI experimentation in public spaces?

•               How can AI deepen engagement with exhibit content?

•               How can museums bring AI into museums to augment the visitor experience without infringing on staff presence and visitor interaction?

Participants will break into small groups to explore real-world scenarios drawn from active MIT Museum projects as well as projects from the home museums of session paerticipants. Group conversation will allow cross-pollination of ideas, best practices, and lessons learned across the museum field, as we collaboratively reflect on the opportunities, tensions, and future directions of AI in museum environments. Then each group will report out and share their experiences with AI.

Session Format: 45-minute interactive session

•    15 min framing presentation

•    20 min small-group discussion activity

•    10 min report-out and synthesis

Digital strategy is an evolving process shaped by institutional culture, leadership, resources, risk tolerance, and changing technologies. The processes by which digital strategies are created, communicated, and sustained are highly consequential to the goals they articulate if those goals are to reach fruition. 

This session longitudinally examines digital strategy development, drawing on experiences from three museums at different stages of their digital strategic journeys. Presenters will trace the lifecycle of their digital strategy work from initial efforts to identify and formalize digital priorities, through implementation and evaluation following a strategy’s launch.

Princeton University Art Museum is crafting its first full digital strategy while awaiting a new museum strategic framework to be developed (starting Summer 2026). Frances Lloyd-Baynes and Jill Oster, authors of the draft strategy, will explore the challenges of developing a digital strategy in a vacuum with no active organizational goals on which to anchor, and in support of a brand new museum undergoing a major digital transformation.

Staff at the NC Museum of Art are working to create a digital resource roadmap in response to an overarching strategic plan for 2026 - 2030. Currently in writing by a digital governance committee, the digital plan aspires to codify museum technologies (software, platforms), operating procedures (asset creation, management), quality standards (WCAG), and an evaluation framework for digital products to support efficient and reliable access to high quality digital experiences by audiences. 

Spencer Museum is an example of an organization with a digital operational strategy in place reporting on how the deliverables have matched their goals for it and supported their work in practice. The Spencer Museum of Art Digital Plan plan was created in 2022 as a result of three years of planning, research, and auditing all digital platforms with Design for Context and One Further with support from the Mellon Foundation. Since launching they have updated the entire plan once (2024), and do 6-month reviews and progress reports for the entire staff.

Our three organizational case studies aim to articulate (1) circumstances that prompt organizations to pursue digital strategy planning, (2) how digital strategies intersect with (existing) institutional strategy documents, governance structures, and day-to-day operations, (3) the roles and personalities most critical to digital strategic decision-making, as well as those most affected by its implementation, and (4) core components of a written digital strategy, and how these have evolved over time.

As museum professionals, we all deeply understand the benefits and challenges of relying on third party technology to help us get stuff done—especially when it comes to bringing the collection online. This often means that: we don’t own our infrastructure, solutions aren’t built for purpose, and new feature requests may never get built. With the rise of vibe coding and agentic development, we are now entering an era where it’s faster and easier than ever to build what we need ourselves. What if the future of museum technology could be owned, light weight, and flexible? In this session, hear from the Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum, the Lucas Museum, museum consultant Chad Weinard, and agency partner AREA 17 on experiments in DIY application development, open source, and the future of the museum tech stack.

Most digital projects don’t end with a bang. Instead, content slowly becomes outdated, snazzy features become obsolete, and the website redesign gets pushed back (again) due to budget cuts, which leaves users to rely on information that’s quietly wrong.

In this 45-minute talk, we’ll give real-world examples of the decision-making frameworks we’ve used to determine whether to “f***/marry/kill” a digital project and its content. Attendees will leave with criteria and key considerations for planning and sunsetting short-, medium-, and long-term projects, as well as guidance on managing stakeholder expectations along the way. They’ll also leave with the understanding that public trust isn’t just built by what we launch, but maintained by what we keep accurate, usable, and accessible.

Erin Cecele Dunigan will discuss Getty’s digital governance model and decision flowchart for determining whether a project should be a temporary bespoke website or a long-lasting digital Quire publication. Sarah Luken will discuss the loose framework she uses at the Corning Museum of Glass to decide when to build a short-term microsite or decade-long digital interactive. Mara Kurlandsky will discuss the process and rubric she created for conducting website content audits for her clients, which have included both small non-profits as well as large national museums.

Drawing from a variety of professional perspectives—from an independent contractor to a large museum with 1,200+ employees to a medium-sized arts organization—this talk will delve into the complexities of deciding when to maintain, archive, or sunset projects and content. Attendees will leave with actionable advice on setting manageable expectations, planning for the future, and getting stakeholders on board with the realities of a digital project’s finite lifespan.

As AI rapidly reshapes user expectations of digital products, museums face a pivotal question: how do we thoughtfully evolve our online collection interfaces — and where do we invest first?

Do we prioritize AI-powered search? AI-augmented records? Or user-facing conversational features that invite visitors to explore collections on their own terms? Each path carries different implications for trust, accuracy, and long-term sustainability.

Panelists will share real-world collection redesign projects, their frameworks for evaluating AI features and functionality, and their roadmaps for future integration. We'll also explore what becomes possible when we think beyond institutional boundaries — sharing technical approaches, case studies, and object data across institutions.

This is a panel for practitioners actively building, experimenting, and wrestling with these decisions. Join us for an honest conversation about tradeoffs, priorities, and what it means to design collection experiences for a world where AI isn't a feature — it's an expectation.

Over the past decade, we’ve gone from 3D capture and display in museums being a difficult, niche offering to something our own visitors can do on their own. And yet, like all emerging technologies, we’re still bogged down by lack of standards, uneven literacy, ongoing technical progress, and resourcing challenges. As many institutions move beyond pilot projects, a key challenge has become how to operationalize 3D imaging as a sustained program—balancing workflow standardization, staffing, and long-term infrastructure needs.  

This panel will explore common threads, best practices, insights, and “what’s next” in 3D imaging. Each museum (Cleveland Museum of Art, The Met, and National Gallery of Art) will share the origins and intents of its program; key insights gathered from doing this work; and use-cases for 3D models. We will also touch on how institutions make decisions about what to scan, and how selection strategies evolve from individual highlight objects to more cohesive, comparative groups that better support research and interpretation. While this is not a technical panel, we will touch on some best practices such as ways to target wide distribution on the web vs sharing for pedagogical study vs scanning to aid conservation treatment and records. Since we are all art museums, we’ll discuss issues particular to art, including copyright concerns, whether one should scan 2D works, and the like. After brief presentations, we will have a panel discussion and invite questions and comments from the audience.  

Each museum on this panel has deep expertise in 3D imaging their respective collections and applying 3D to a wide range of applications. We also represent well-resourced museums, and we want to make clear to our audience ways others can build upon our work, without needing the same level of investment of people, time, and money and to reflect on how these approaches adapt and evolve as programs scale.

In early 2026, LACMA shipped Collections Online — a public search and discovery site for the museum's collection — in roughly 3.5 months from kickoff to launch. The team was small (LACMA's digital team of two) and the work was deeply collaborative across overlapping skills: LACMA's Senior Director of Publishing — portfolio across editorial, design, and web/digital — anchoring the experience perspective and the internal advocacy that kept the work aligned across the organization; an independent backend engineer on the data platform application; the Folder Design team behind the visual design system and reference demos; the Urban Insight team behind the Netlify-hosted Next.js front end — search integration, frontend architecture, performance, and the discovery experience; and LACMA's Director of Digital Strategy & Infrastructure, who architected the overall environment and built the systems around the data platform (image, AI, search, monitoring, admin tooling, data flows), iterated on intent, and held day-to-day validation, troubleshooting, and coordination.

At the center sits a custom data platform — a FastAPI on ECS application backed by PostgreSQL/RDS — that ingests eleven TMS SQL views (about 1.1 million rows per cycle) plus 119,000 AI-enriched records from DynamoDB, applies user-defined transformation rulesets, and publishes through REST, GraphQL, and a bulk OpenSearch index. Two VPCs joined by peering, schema/rules admin UI, 6-hour ingest cadence with admin-triggered refresh.

A Lambda + SQS image processing pipeline moves 68,000 image-bearing objects (and derivatives) into KMS-encrypted S3. An AI enrichment layer — a SageMaker-hosted SigLIP 2 vision model run ephemerally on g5.xlarge, plus a long-running EC2 service for visual descriptions, embeddings, and search-time text encoding — produces the metadata for hybrid vector search and accessibility. An OpenSearch cluster handles faceted keyword search. A pair of admin tools — diagnostic Lookups and editorial Overrides — keep curatorial, engineering, and the data pipeline honest about what is surfacing on the site.

On the frontend, Next.js + Netlify deliver the public experience, CDN-optimized for scale.

- End-to-End Architecture: the AWS/FastAPI stack, frontend delivery, and operations — with cost and performance numbers for each piece.

- The Reality of AI-Assisted Engineering: where Claude and Gemini delivered 10x acceleration, where they introduced subtle costly bugs, and where we reverted to traditional engineering.

- Operationalizing AI: prompt engineering, agent-based workflows, and the scaffolding that makes AI-assisted work repeatable across a hybrid team.

In this session, we break down both the technical architecture and the collection discovery experience behind the build, sharing key architectural decisions, tradeoffs, lessons learned, and our playbook, including:

The goal is to share a working playbook, with the rough edges visible, for any institution considering a similar build.

In 2026, crowdsourcing methodologies are not considered "new and innovative." However, the erosion of public trust and proliferation of AI-generated content give these methodologies new and greater significance. Far from being made irrelevant by emerging tech, crowdsourcing and collaboration are more important than ever to balance thoughtful use of advanced computing techniques and engage audiences that are increasingly skeptical of authoritative narratives. 

Participatory engagement invites audiences to take ownership of the preservation and diffusion of knowledge. Such programs reinscribe the museum’s role as steward, rather than owner, of memory and learning. As hosts and facilitators, museums empower experts, scholars, and members of the public to create community in pursuit of a common goal, facilitating inter- and intragenerational connections through lifelong learning.  

On this panel, speakers share their methodologies for two crowdsourcing activities: Wikipedia edit-a-thons led by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and Lost Women of Science; and Freedmen’s Bureau transcribe-a-thons led by Smithsonian Transcription Center and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.  

Through these two event formats, organizers create communal spaces for participants to learn and practice, with guidance and encouragement from experts and one another. These projects illuminate women’s and African American history by empowering the public to engage directly with primary and secondary sources and take an active role in the discoverability of science and cultural heritage data. Here, crowdsourcing builds trust by offering an opportunity to contribute that promotes a fuller understanding of historical sources and how history is documented, preserved, and shared. 

This session will discuss how participatory engagement can be a catalyst for endurance and sustainability in the maintenance of public trust. These methodologies also serve as both counterbalance to and critical partner for responsible AI-supported methodologies. How can a museum balance goals of completion with goals of participation? How can we make complex and detail-oriented processes approachable and appealing to broad audiences? What is the unique value of human-generated contributions in the current moment? 

Attendees will learn about the importance of developing multiple points of access to ensure accessibility and engagement across audiences and consider models for building trust, community, and an enduring practice. They’ll consider the critical role presenters play in engaging audiences and the emerging relationship between AI and crowdsourcing work. Panelists will discuss the strategies for designing crowdsourcing projects and programs that appeal across generations and cultures. Attendees will also learn about models for collaboration involving both internal and external partners.

Museum technologists work in ecotones — the biological term for transition zones where two ecosystems meet, like where forest gives way to meadow. Ecotones are the most biodiverse and most generative zones in nature. Yet, also the most precarious. Museum digital work lives on exactly this kind of edge: between conservation and innovation, between the tech sector's velocity and museums’ slower cycles of change. What happens in ecotones directly impacts the heart of an ecosystem: edge activities can augment institutional capacity to adapt and survive in rapidly evolving conditions. Sustainability, in this context, is not green-IT compliance. It is the question of how museum workers can keep showing up in the in-between. Human sustainability is what institutional longevity depends on. In museums, we talk about long-term stewardship of collections, platforms, and knowledge, but rarely about long-term stewardship of the people doing that work. A technologist who stays in the field across decades, who carries institutional memory, who maintains trust with their colleagues and their public — that person is a longevity infrastructure.




This 45-minute Imagination Bootcamp explores sustainability in the in-between by taking the conference hotel itself as material. Hotels are liminal by design — full of people in transit, between homes, between meetings, neither here nor there. They are also stacked with overlooked ecotones: lobby thresholds, service corridors, and, in this case, a green roof where infrastructure meets living systems. This experiential session invites participants to use the metaphor of ecotones as a way of imagining new dynamics and structures for digital museum work. We will move through a short somatic warm-up that tunes awareness of immediate surroundings, a site-based practice that connects us to generations of workers and guests who have moved through this building, and a small-group exercise that extends attention to the more-than-human world sharing the space with us.




The Bootcamp draws on participants’ lived experience, futures literacy, and embodiment. Dr. Marina Gross-Hoy's research into museum professional ecosystems as ecotones — sites of cross-sectoral collaboration shaped by the fundamental paradox between conservation and communication – is the foundation. Imagination is trained here like a muscle: through attention, body, and place, rather than through forecast or scenario.

Participants will leave with a felt sense of their own ecotones, a small artifact from the session, and an imagination practice they can carry into their work. The Bootcamp is designed for technologists who suspect that the most urgent infrastructure question is not which platform to adopt next, but how to remain imaginative, embodied, and trustworthy across the long arc of institutional change.

No previous experience with somatic practice, futures methods, or speculative design is required. Comfortable shoes for walking are recommended.

In March 2026, the RISD Museum opened Ways of Looking, an introductory gallery that orients visitors to the museum while offering tools for engaging with artwork (https://risdmuseum.org/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/ways-looking). This project departs from standard museum practice: it was led by interpretation and education staff rather than curators; it spans two galleries but presents only three artworks, prioritizing close engagement; and it positions the visitor’s response as not only valid, but essential. Works of art, collection research, and visitors’ contributions are presented with equal weight in the space, creating a collaborative experience. 

This session explores how power is constructed and distributed in museum collections, curation, and interpretation. Using Ways of Looking as a case study, participants will examine practical strategies for sharing authority with visitors. Attendees will learn how interpretation and technological interventions can disrupt traditional narratives and create more inclusive museum experiences.

In one gallery, we created a drawing space with projections, drawing prompts, and a pegboard for displaying visitor responses. In another, two audio pieces introduced perspectives from an artist and a security guard. Presented through spatial audio and a landline phone turned into an audio player/recorder, these works created a communal listening experience while inviting visitors to record their questions. We made explicit what museum professionals often leave implicit, including how to read labels and how to interpret works of art. We presented four key ideas as springboards for interpretation: process, meanings, origins, and connections. Curiosity and play were embedded throughout the design, encouraging engagement across ages and levels of familiarity.

Visitors often enter museums unsure how to look at art, what questions to ask, or how to do a museum “right,” leading to a lack of confidence or connection. The RISD Museum is one of the few publicly accessible spaces within a larger academic institution. We aim to share knowledge rather than gatekeep it. Visitors should understand that a museum is a network of people with varied skills and perspectives, not a monolith. Through this space, we aim to build trust between the institution and its visitors.

Trust is a two-way exchange: museum professionals must build credibility through accessible, transparent experiences, and Ways of Looking includes resources visitors can carry beyond the galleries. At the same time, institutions must demonstrate trust in visitors’ experiences, questions, and creative insight. This reciprocity is expressed through tools like the landline message system, as well as more formal feedback that directly informs future experiences.

This space operationalizes the values laid out in our strategic plan: becoming more welcoming, curious, collaborative, and bold. A strategic plan should not sit on a shelf; it should be felt in practice.

The rise of generative AI interfaces, from conversational search to autonomous agents, is quietly dismantling some of the most foundational assumptions of web publishing. Traffic patterns are shifting. Zero-click interactions are rising. Content that once drove users to a website is increasingly consumed before a visit ever happens. This panel session explores what these changes mean in practice for organizations that have invested heavily in their web presence: how to think about visibility in an AI-mediated landscape, what "reach" means when your content is an input to someone else's model, and how the role of the website is changing from destination to signal. The death of the website is the wrong question, but the right instinct: what is actually dying is a set of assumptions about how people find, access, and relate to content online. Rather than declaring the website dead, this panel makes the case for a more nuanced transition that requires content strategists, developers, and digital leaders to fundamentally rethink what a website is for.