MCN 2026

To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Unites States, the central @Smithsonian social media team was tasked with creating 250 pieces of content with an emphasis on video. To meet this ambitious goal, they have been building new workflows across internal communications teams to tell stories across 21 museums, research centers, and the National Zoo.  

First, the team expanded beyond social media. The central Office of Public Affairs formed a working group that includes members of the marketing, press, social media, web, and 250 communications teams. Presenters will cover how responsibilities have been divided (and conquered) and how the strategy has been rolled out to garner internal buy-in across the institution.  

How do they tailor content to specific channels and platforms? In a multi-channel strategy where all channels matter, how do they handle internal competition? Who participates in the planning and editing process? How do they measure success? 

By diving into specific video series, presenters will explore these questions and share lessons learned.

This case study offers a closer look at this year’s wildly successful short-form Museum Rizzler video series, created by the National Gallery of Art’s social media team. We’ll discuss the right way to lean into a trend, balancing humor and art history, and the logistics of delivering content in a nimble and responsive way. The presentation will also address practical considerations including cross-team collaboration, approvals, production timelines, and risk assessment when participating in fast-moving online conversations. By sharing lessons learned, performance insights, and examples from the series, this session offers a framework for museums seeking to participate authentically in internet culture while maintaining institutional values and audience trust.

For the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), the answer is clear: increase in-person visitation and help the museum reach its goal of one million annual visits. But like many institutions, Mia’s website was not originally designed with that level of strategic specificity. It functioned as a broad information resource—useful, but not intentionally structured to drive visits, guide decisions, or build ongoing relationships with audiences.




In this session, Mia and Forum One share how they are approaching the challenge of rethinking the website’s role as part of a broader, cross-functional system. The work began with detailed end-to-end service blueprinting, mapping visitor journeys across digital and physical touchpoints to understand how marketing, content, staff interactions, and technology systems intersect to shape the experience. This process surfaced critical gaps: moments where interest is generated but not converted, and where no single team owns the full journey.




Building on this foundation, the team is applying a Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) approach to focus on what visitors are actually trying to accomplish—such as planning a visit or discovering events. By defining these jobs, the team can better understand the systems required to support them and identify targeted opportunities to reduce friction and improve outcomes.




The session includes an interactive mapping activity where participants will map a visitor journey and the systems that support it, making visible the cross-functional nature of their own organizations. From this shared view, presenters will introduce a practical approach to identifying small, testable improvements tied to specific moments in the journey.




As institutions develop a clearer understanding of user pathways and patterns, they unlock new opportunities to experiment with growth loops—designing experiences that encourage repeat visits, sharing, and deeper engagement over time. Rather than optimizing for one-time interactions, this approach supports more intentional, repeatable audience growth.




Attendees will leave with a framework for approaching their own work: not as a one-time redesign effort, but as an ongoing, iterative process for improving systems that support real-world outcomes.

Over the course of more than a year, a cross-functional team from the Getty including data engineers, catalogers, and frontend developers coordinated remotely with our counterparts at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The remit was simple: How do we surface the ways our collections connect? Given that our collections are both modeled in linked open data, specifically Linked Art, given that our technical stacks are aligned, and given that both institutions promote open collections often and publicly -- what could we actually do that practically demonstrates our shared commitment to open standards? After months of planning, the collaboration culminated with an in-person, hands-on prototyping session. The point was to explore, focusing on what was lightweight, likely ephemeral, and leveraged existing resources and expertise. 

The process ended up helping us shine a light on core institutional concerns: using shared data models in real-life; authority, branding, and UX issues; organizational differences across institutions; and just how collections ought to live outside our own museum contexts. This talk touches on what we can learn (and unlearn) when we go beyond talking about data models and start building a working app from scratch alongside an unfamiliar team.

What does it take to navigate last-minute resistance on the eve of a collections-wide portal launch after two years of planning and execution? How do you avoid the derailment of an already moving train?

In mid-2025, The Huntington launched a pan-collections portal that combines our three collecting divisions —the Library, the Art Museum, and the Botanical Gardens— into one cohesive discovery platform on our main website.

The objective was straightforward and in-line with our 5-year strategic plan: create a simple, navigable, and accessible online space for casual users to explore all our collections without having to navigate three separate formal research sites. Although the launch of this discovery portal took nearly two years of planning and execution, at the midnight hour, we experienced a near mutiny from our curatorial teams who were unaware of and expressly displeased with the need to consolidate cataloging and metadata practices to a cross-divisional level. They felt like they were losing control over the collections they're responsible for, and they didn’t like that. 

This is a case study of how the discovery portal team had to quell anxieties and problem-solve our way into proceeding with an imminent launch, despite objections.

We will discuss the development and execution process, where things went wrong, and the steps we took to address these last-minute concerns and build trust among our internal users, particularly our curators.

We will also cover what sustainability looks like after implementation: governance, clear decision rights, documentation, and a workable path to raise issues, so problems aren’t solved ad hoc—or by the loudest voice.  Attendees will leave with a fresh perspective on how disagreements, especially at the most critical moments, are opportunities for positive change and encouragement in team building and trust-building.

How do you modernize critical exhibit systems without disrupting the visitor experience? This session explores how the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is upgrading the backend infrastructure that powers its digital exhibits. From replacing outdated technologies to introducing containerized systems and real-time monitoring, this work ensures reliability at scale while supporting millions of visitors each year. Learn how to approach modernization in a live museum environment, make the case for change, and implement upgrades that improve both operational stability and long-term sustainability.

When the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened in 2014, its digital exhibit systems were built using technologies that were appropriate at the time but have since become outdated. Over the years, these systems have remained central to the visitor experience, supporting some of the most meaningful and interactive elements of the Museum. However, maintaining reliability and performance at scale has become increasingly challenging. This session focuses on how we are modernizing the backend infrastructure that powers three core interactive exhibits: the Memorial Exhibition interactive, the Signing Steel Kiosks and Projected Map, and the Last Column interactive. These experiences allow visitors to engage deeply with the stories of victims, leave personal reflections, and explore artifacts connected to first responders and recovery workers. The goal of this modernization effort is not just to replace outdated technologies, but to ensure long-term stability, scalability, and ease of management. I will walk through how we evaluated the existing systems, identified risks associated with legacy components, and prioritized upgrades while keeping the exhibits fully operational. A key part of this work involves moving to a containerized architecture using tools such as Docker Compose. This shift allows us to standardize deployments, improve system reliability, and reduce the complexity of maintaining multiple applications. In parallel, we are modernizing our content management capabilities, making them accessible so exhibit staff can more easily manage and update digital content without heavy technical dependency. Another important focus is observability. By integrating modern monitoring and logging tools, we now have real-time visibility into system performance and usage patterns. This not only helps us proactively address issues but also provides valuable insights into how visitors interact with these exhibits. Throughout the session, I will also discuss the practical side of this work—how to build a case for modernization within a museum setting, how to balance risk and continuity, and how to execute technical upgrades in a live, high-traffic environment.

The best exhibit technology disappears. A visitor reaches for a screen, a button, and a story unfolds. That invisibility requires, in practice, a set of architectural decisions that many museum platforms never make — decisions that determine not just who can experience an exhibit today, but whether the system holding it together will still hold up after exhibits rotate, content changes, audience needs shift, staff turns over, and the vendors you launched with are no longer the vendors you have.

At the Obama Presidential Center, we treated accessibility and longevity as architecture problems. The result is a centralized exhibit platform powering the OPC's digital experiences. It spans cloud-based content authoring, a MongoDB-backed exhibit API, on-premises Docker services, and a fleet of devices — touchscreen kiosks and dedicated accessibility UXP devices — all drawing from the same content and event model. Every device, whatever its form, is a client of the same system. The visitor at the touchscreen and the visitor at the UXP station are not having parallel experiences maintained by separate codebases. They are having the same experience, delivered differently. Accessibility decisions in museums are often mistaken for content decisions — alt text, audio descriptions, alternative formats. These matter, but they are downstream of something more fundamental: whether the system itself was designed to serve more than one kind of visitor.

This didn't emerge from the architecture. It is the architecture.

Building the suite of services taught us that the decisions with the deepest impact on accessibility and longevity are rarely the visible ones — and that getting them right early is what makes everything else possible. The unglamorous choices about how content is shared, how devices communicate, and how much the running exhibit depends on live infrastructure turned out to be the choices that had the most impact.

This session is a case study in those decisions — how we made them, what they cost, what they produced, and what we would do differently. The OPC had dedicated engineering resources that many institutions cannot count on. We don't want to paper over that. But the principles that guided us are not proprietary, and the questions they answer — who can access this, and will it last — are ones every institution is already living with, whatever their stack.

I hope to leave attendees with a clearer sense of what trustworthy exhibit infrastructure can look like, and a vocabulary for advocating for it in their own contexts.