MCN 2026

Many museum digital projects have an accessibility gap. Images go without alt-text not because institutions don't care, but because writing it at scale – across hundreds of objects, for rotating content, with limited staff – is genuinely hard. When Bloomberg Connects introduced AI-generated alt-text into its CMS, the goal was to close that gap. What we learned was something different: that trust in an AI tool isn't primarily about what the AI can do. It's about what the human can still decide.

This session tells that story from both sides of the table.

In a structured 9-institution pilot, we ran 450+ images through the tool and measured every interaction. Every metric outperformed its target. But the most striking result wasn't the acceptance rate or the time savings; it was that 100% of pilot partners reported feeling in control of the final alt-text. That didn't happen by accident. It was the product of specific design choices: a clear visual separation between AI suggestion and human-editable field, an explicit accept or reject step, no auto-population. The design assumed that curatorial judgment was non-negotiable, and partners felt it.

The pilot also surfaced harder questions that design decisions alone couldn't resolve. When the AI consistently omits skin tone in portraits, is that a safe default or an act of erasure? When it recognizes one religious figure and not another, what does that reveal about whose cultural knowledge is encoded in the model? Partners didn't just want to know what the tool could do: 7 out of 9 asked us to document what it wouldn't do, and why. That transparency mattered as much as the output.

By the time of this session, the tool will have been live across Bloomberg Connects' full partner network for 5 months. This panel draws on the controlled pilot findings and the real-world launch data together, giving attendees both the structured experiment and the longitudinal test of whether what worked with 9 institutions holds at scale.

The session is structured as a panel of co-presenters, not a product demo. Each presenter brings a distinct perspective and a specific artifact – a real image, a before-and-after alt-text, a moment where they overrode the AI – to ground their contribution in practice. Attendees will leave with frameworks they can apply to their own AI adoption decisions, not as a question of capability, but as a question of institutional fit, governance, and what trust actually requires.

Session structure:

10 min - Bloomberg Connects platform framing: the accessibility problem and the design hypothesis       

10 min - Wolfsonian-FIU's experience what they expected, what surprised them, anchored in a specific example from their collection

10 min - Baltimore Museum of Art's experience: where the tool held up and where it raised harder questions, anchored in a specific example from their collection

15 min - Group discussion & Q&A: building across all 3 perspectives on trust, control, and what they'd do differently

Following our previous sessions—One Collection to Rule Them All (MCN 2024) and Future-Proofing through Sustainability and Resilience (MCN 2025)—we return with the third chapter in our evolving story of digital transformation at The Huntington. Framed by this year’s themes of trust and longevity, our session explores not just how an organization grows its technology infrastructure and digital capacity, but also how enduring relationships make that growth possible. Centered on the recently launched My Huntington Portal, we’ll share the realities behind the work: aligning multiple vendors around an ambitious technical roadmap to integrate our CMS with our ticketing/membership, retail, and CRM systems; facing critical business decisions; cultivating stakeholder buy-in; and coordinating across diverse internal teams and priorities. We’ll examine how to ensure that what you build remains sustainable—not only for the organization, but for the people responsible for maintaining and evolving it.

In summer 2025, The Huntington began efforts to create an industry-leading integrated customer portal that would simplify visitor and member account management and power a personalized website experience – including tailored calendar listings and other targeted content based on the unique aspects of the visitor’s customer profile. Our goals were for the portal to drive additional earned revenue through targeted marketing and upsell opportunities, increase engagement and member satisfaction through a carefully designed user experience, and maximize operational efficiency through reliable data workflows. This would be a critical strategic cornerstone to our “One Huntington” ethos and revamped brand message – we need to appear as a unified entity to the public and be gracious hosts online, as we are in person, to build and maintain brand loyalty and satisfaction. 

In this session, The Huntington, Co-Curator, and Cogapp will show how the project moved from strategy into implementation without losing alignment across teams, systems, and priorities. Co-Curator will share how the portal was built inside Shopify Customer Accounts, using a reusable custom application layer shaped through this work and now being adapted for other cultural organizations. Cogapp will show how that member context extends into huntington.org through personalized calendar and content experiences, tighter paths into ticketing, and clearer upgrade opportunities. Rather than focusing only on the finished product, we’ll unpack the architecture decisions, handoffs, and governance patterns that made the work sustainable—and increasingly repeatable—for cultural organizations with different systems, teams, and constraints.

At the heart of our project, and our success, is trust: a client-vendor-collaborator partnership built over time and essential to making complex digital change possible.

Visiting an art museum often heavily relies on visual perception. For patrons who are blind or low vision, this dependence significantly impedes their experience. By conveying an artwork’s composition and content through a descriptive textual representation, museums can help close this gap. However, most museum collections are too vast to manually develop descriptions for each object, inspiring the question, “how can AI help streamline the writing process?”

Over the past two years, a collaborative, inter-museum working group of US-based art museums has been exploring using generative AI to provide image descriptions and alt- text for artwork. This session will explore how two of these museums, the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) and the National Gallery of Art (NGA), implemented comprehensive workflows to make visual descriptions available online for every primary image in their collections.

This session will dive into the technical, practical, ethical, and conceptual challenges inherent in developing generative AI pipelines in production and sharing this content with the public. We will share key decision points and processes put in place to instill confidence both internally and externally in the generated descriptions and maintain that confidence as new images become available and are described moving forward.

We will discuss in depth our respective approaches for developing infrastructure to develop, test, and integrate the descriptions with internal systems, and the strong collaboration with teams across each museum throughout the process. Emphasizing the importance of thoughtfully and responsibly sharing these descriptions, we will also talk through our final steps for publishing the descriptions for the public and continuing to gather feedback post-production.

Finally, each museum will share their next steps on image descriptions and their broader uses of AI that have developed out of this work, including broader cross-collection discovery efforts and accessible in-gallery experiences.

This session examines the reimagined ArtLens Gallery from the perspective of project management, using the framework of how we divided our responsibilities for a complex and ambitious undertaking involving multiple partners and collaborators. We divided project management roles between the physical space, the app, and the emphasis on making the experiences more inclusive and accessible to counteract the inaccessibility inherent to an art museum for blind or low vision people, while better supporting visitors with a wide range of sensory, mobility, and cognitive access needs.

We’ll share how we managed: 

- Accessible Exhibition Design: The physical design choices we implemented to make the gallery more accessible to blind or low vision visitors, also enhancing the experience for all.

- Developing a Tactile Interface: How we developed an interactive that uses a tactile reproduction of an artwork as a user interface.

- ArtLens App Rebuild: How we rebuilt the ArtLens app to make it easier for visitors to explore, learn, and connect at the CMA, under a tight, inflexible timeline. Prioritized for accessibility and inclusivity for all users, the new app is built with a unified codebase for both iOS and Android and is strategically integrated within the CMA’s digital ecosystem to leverage the existing app technologies and build on what already works.

- Dissecting the Museum Map: Using this page as a case study, we’ll examine key decisions, challenges, and outcomes, to unpack the complexities of the project and highlight the lessons learned.

- Managing App Integration with the Physical Space: Project management strategies used to align cross-functional teams around a shared docking approach that served as the technical bridge between the app and physical space and the foundation for accessibility affordances. 

- Managing Scope, Tradeoff, and Delivery Impacts: How key decisions, such as physical versus proximity docking, were scoped, evaluated, and implemented within real-world constraints, and how those choices impacted timelines, user flows, and accessibility outcomes. 

- Balancing Vision with Reality: What we’d do differently with additional time or resources and how the project continues to evolve beyond launch.

Unlike previous iterations, the reimagined ArtLens prioritizes inclusive experiences that make art matter. Through an integrated approach that combines physical exhibition design and the mobile application, the gallery offers consistent, multi-sensory experiences that reduce barriers and support independent exploration.

Jaws drop. Eyes widen. Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast or profound that leads you to see the world in a different way. Regularly experiencing and reflecting on moments of awe can have long-term benefits for our minds, bodies, and social connections. It opens us up to new ways of thinking, shifts perspectives, and increases empathy. And art is the perfect place to start. 

The National Gallery of Art’s learning and engagement and visitor experience teams together with Dr. Dacher Keltner and the Social Interaction Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, have researched how people can cultivate awe through art. But how do we foster that experience online? The museum’s awe and digital content teams have experimented with developing interactive articles that encourage curiosity, wonder, emotional connection, and a deeper engagement with visual art. In this session, we’ll introduce you to the principles of awe, share insights from the National Gallery’s research, and explore how to adapt these findings into content choices—from pacing and tone to visuals and multimedia materials. You’ll leave with tools to help your online visitors pause, look closely, reflect, and find more awe in their lives.