MCN 2026

Meet other MCN attendees with some speed networking! A facilitator will guide attendees through a series of breakout conversations. Share with fellow attendees where you're from, what you're curious about, and more—just be quick!

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.

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.

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.

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.