MCN 2026

The brutal reality in 2026 is that there is scant effort being made in the cultural heritage sector to engage with generative systems outside of being simple consumers. Maybe one of the big vendors will give us discounted rates for a limited time and we can achieve "great things". At the end of the day though few, if any, organizations will be in a position to control their own destiny. Nor will they  have done anything to change the power dynamic of surviving on the benevolence of someone else's handouts. We simply don't have the knowledge, skills or means to deploy these systems and little to no collective work is happening right now to change that.

SFO Museum has been developing a suite of open source tools designed to run on consumer-grade hardware (even old and crusty hardware) for producing, storing, querying and visualizing vector embeddings using as many different open-weight large language models as possible. Specifically we are using vector embeddings to implement image similarity features for collections imagery and other image-based artifacts related to museum programming; to offer avenues of suggestion for investigating our various efforts derived from the properties "seen" by different ML models in the images of those works.

This idea of using vector embeddings to "bridge" different aspects of museum programming – collections imagery, photos posted to social media, exhibition and installation photos - has led SFO Museum to publish our vector embeddings for anyone else to use and to encourage the broader cultural heritage sector to do the same. Cross-institutional collections search continues to be something of a “holy grail” in museums and other cultural heritage institutions. Vector-based image similarity, while imperfect, offers a meaningful first step to finally achieve it. It is a messy, or at least fuzzy, solution and tilts more towards the “discovery and surprise” end of the spectrum rather than informed academic research. While it may not be a tool for scholars and experts, it can still provide meaningful avenues for non-experts to investigate and discover the relationship between different collections. This was still the stuff of fantasy a few years ago and now it is within our reach using nothing more than consumer-grade computer hardware.

This presentation will demonstrate the work SFO Museum has done to date. It will discuss the theory practice and gotchas of the work to date and solicit feedback, criticism and hopefully increased participation from the broader cultural heritage sector. The goal is to demonstrate that we have agency beyond a monthly-recurring fee to third-party vendors.