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.

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!

As generative AI and emerging “vibe coding” workflows rapidly lower technical barriers, museum professionals with varying levels of software development expertise can expand experimentation with visual methods of data inquiry using creative coding, data visualization, and interactive storytelling. This session explores how artist-centered technologies—particularly the long-running open-source creative coding platform Processing—can help museums uncover new insights, reveal hidden relationships in collections data, and prototype new forms of public engagement.

Bringing together perspectives from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, New Mexico Highlands University, and the Processing Foundation, panelists will discuss how creative coding, open-source tools, and AI-assisted workflows can expand experimentation. Through practical examples and case studies, the session will examine how museums can begin working with these tools, evaluate appropriate technologies and AI models, collaborate effectively with developers, and thoughtfully transition from prototype to production. Panelists will also reflect on how these lowered barriers may expand participation in open-source creative technology communities, enabling a wider range of museum professionals, artists, and educators to experiment, contribute, and shape emerging digital practices. The session will also highlight emerging support structures, including mentorship and grant opportunities from the Processing Foundation, that can help sustain creative coding initiatives over time.

At a moment when trust in digital information systems is increasingly fractured, creative coding offers museums new ways to make interpretation, process, and inquiry more visible. Panelists will explore how these approaches can support long-term relevance and trust by encouraging transparency, experimentation, and broader participation in shaping digital cultural experiences.

Museums are among the most trusted institutions in our world, but do our digital interfaces earn or erode that trust? Long-lived digital products such as online collections, educational resources, and online exhibitions represent significant investments and access points for museums. Ensuring that these products are easy and enjoyable to use is central to maintaining public trust and institutional longevity. In other words, trust is a UX issue.

This session explores the origin, structure, and impact of the Smithsonian’s User Experience (UX) Lab, a pan-institutional program designed to embed user research into everyday digital decision-making. Launched by the Office of Digital and Innovation as an internal service offering, the UX Lab partners with museums, libraries, and research units to conduct usability studies that generate actionable findings and build a more user-centered culture across a complex organization. 

The presentation will highlight several UX Lab studies, including one focused on the National Museum of American History’s online collections catalog and related discovery experiences. Attendees will learn how key audiences such as researchers, educators, and history enthusiasts interact with museums online, where their expectations break down, and what that reveals about long-term risks and design opportunities for improving digital collections platforms.

The session concludes with practical takeaways from across the 18 UX Lab studies conducted so far that any museum—regardless of size, budget, or technical maturity—can apply to improve digital experiences and support their mission for the long haul.

How does a cultural institution position itself as the definitive educational authority on a historical subject — not just today, but for a new generation to come? The generation that lived through World War II and the Truman presidency — that fought in the Pacific, rationed food on the home front, listened to Truman's voice on the radio, and cast ballots in 1948 — is nearly gone. Within a decade, the living memory of these events will be gone. What remains will be collections, documents, oral histories, photographs, and the digital records and experiences institutions build right now to carry these critical histories forward.

This session presents two history museums navigating that transition in real time: the National World War II Museum and the Truman Library Institute. Both are engaged in long-term digital strategy work explicitly designed to answer the same question from different angles: how do you build digital experiences that preserve the weight and truth of history for audiences who have no personal connection to it and who are growing up in an often-chaotic information environment?

The answer both institutions are working toward is not nostalgia. It is education and storytelling. In both cases, that ambition has produced concrete, purpose-built digital foundations designed to meet the next generation where they are.

At the Truman Library Institute, that means a new web presence which intends to surpass the official federal (.gov) site in depth and usability, also doubling down on credibility at a tenuous moment in history, paired with a quote-based AI-driven chatbot, a tool that allows students and general audiences to engage directly with Truman’s words, decisions, and legacy through a conversational interface grounded entirely in the historical record. 

At the National World War II Museum, that means a sustained investment in purpose-built digital architecture: an authoritative infrastructure designed to establish the Museum as the trusted anchor for WWII education and storytelling online. In an era when students are as likely to encounter AI-generated summaries or algorithmically surfaced partial histories as they are to find rigorous scholarship, the Museum’s digital strategy is oriented toward a clear goal: becoming the place where diverse audiences can reliably find research-driven, editorially vetted, and perspectives-inclusive accounts of World War II’s full scope and complexity.

Both institutions reflect the same underlying conviction: that the best response to a fractured information environment is not to retreat from digital engagement, but to build better, more trustworthy digital experiences and to plan for their longevity. The session will trace how each institution arrived at its approach through deep stakeholder engagement, user research, phased implementation, and a sustained commitment to organizational alignment, and then open the floor for discussion of what this work means for the broader museum field.

More than a decade ago, Research Quest was recognized at NMC as a “Best of Show” prototype—an ambitious digital learning experience designed to connect students with real museum collections and scientific data. Ten years later, it has been developed into 15 distinct learning modules in use today by hundreds of educators and thousands of learners across the United States. What does it take for a digital experience not just to launch successfully, but to endure—and continue to earn trust over time?

This session offers a longitudinal case study of Research Quest’s evolution, examining the design decisions, trade-offs, and core commitments that allowed the platform to adapt across shifting technologies, audiences, and expectations without losing its integrity. As digital ecosystems accelerate and trust in information sources becomes increasingly fragile, designing for longevity requires more than innovation—it demands clarity about what should remain constant.

Drawing on close collaboration between the fields of design and the learning sciences, we will explore how foundational principles—such as centering authentic contexts, supporting inquiry-based engagement, and making scientific processes visible—have shaped both user experience and long-term credibility of the content. We will share examples of how scaffolding was refined over time to better support learners exercise data agency as they interprete complex data, understand uncertainty, and engage in evidence-based reasoning – supporting how to think not what to think.

Participants will examine what changed (platforms, interfaces, distribution models) and what did not (commitments to authenticity, learner agency, and scientific integrity), and consider how these decisions contributed to sustained use and trust. The session will also surface tensions between innovation and stability, and the realities of maintaining and evolving a digital product within institutional constraints.

As museums and cultural organizations navigate rapidly changing technological landscapes—including AI-generated content and shifting expectations around authority—this session offers a grounded perspective on designing systems that endure. Participants will leave with practical frameworks for building digital experiences that can evolve over time while maintaining credibility, relevance, and trust.