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.

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.