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.

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.

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.

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.

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.