Schedule

Open access doesn’t guarantee impact. Drawing on large-scale API usage data from the Europeana Foundation, this session reveals what actually happens when digital collections are made available at scale—and why much of that access fails to translate into meaningful use.

By unpacking real patterns in behaviour, reuse and drop-off, this talk challenges common assumptions about openness. It then offers a practical framework to help institutions move from simply publishing collections to enabling real engagement, reuse and value.

Attendees will leave with concrete ways to design, measure and improve the impact of their own digital collections, even if they don’t offer an API themselves.

The SWCE project is the first outing from The Museum Platform—and, as far as the team is aware, the first outing anywhere—to use collections data from the Museum Data Service. This NLHF-funded project aims to provide an entry point to museums in the South West, allowing them to showcase their collections within a coherent, beautifully designed whole. Alongside the collections data, The Museum Platform has built in a user-generated content module which allows visitors to save their own lists, a simple mobile tour builder and more.

How do you create a single digital exhibition from collections distributed across multiple museums? Bodies That (Don’t) Matter is a digital-first project commissioned by the Catalan Art Museums Network, bringing together works from nine institutions within a shared curatorial framework. The project approaches the network itself as the exhibition material, and it explores the challenges of connecting dispersed collections, designing navigation as interpretation and building a meaningful digital experience beyond the logic of the catalogue. A behind-the-scenes look at curatorship, design and technology working together.

How do you put AI to work on collections records you can’t afford to get wrong? This talk shares a National Gallery pilot tested on 1933–1945 provenance (the most unforgiving material in the collection) and demonstrates a working method built on two principles: AI that flags what it doesn’t know, and output that reads as English prose and parses as data. The method serves registrars, exhibition teams, curators and researchers querying the same record from their own professional perspectives. Attendees will leave with a method, a diagnostic and the vocabulary to specify what their records actually demand of any AI model.

How can AI techniques enhance collections data and the interface to search and display the artworks themselves? Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco worked in partnership with Cogapp and Anthropic to build a prototype that integrated around 8,500 collection records from three Bay Area museums, each with different data formats and schemas. The team used an AI pipeline to normalise the data, add visual and semantic embeddings, and generate cited artwork descriptions. The resulting interface interprets natural language queries and surfaces semantically ranked results across all institutions. The session presents the key findings from creating this novel prototype, as well as the unresolved tensions it raised.

100k people watch an episode of ‘Curator’s Corner’ and rave about the objects featured. The British Museum has a phenomenal digital catalogue of 4.5 million objects used globally by researchers. The video provides more in-depth information and more angles of the object than the catalogue; the catalogue provides an extensive bibliography and links to related objects. Unfortunately, the database does not allow for tags or URLs. So how do you get viewers to the catalogue and researchers to the video? This session shows how the British Museum integrated its Collection Online into YouTube, with no coding, no additional features and no budget.

Discover how digital tools can spark real human connection. In this session, we share how Art UK’s community volunteering programme transforms digital initiatives on a national online platform into a local, social experience. Through Tagger, a simple artwork-tagging tool, participants connect, share stories and rediscover their places and heritage together. Blending online access with in‑person sessions in community spaces, the programme reduces isolation, builds confidence and supports wellbeing. With over 1,300 participants already involved, we’ll reveal practical insights, real impact and inspiring voices, showing how digital engagement can create meaningful, lasting connections that bring people and art closer than ever.

Museums are racing to explore AI-powered search, tagging, discovery and personalisation. But technology alone cannot create meaningful digital transformation. The institutions seeing the greatest success are those that have invested in the foundations beneath their collections: governance, metadata, workflows, accessibility and organisational alignment. Drawing on lessons from large-scale museum digital transformation initiatives, this session explores how digital collections can evolve from a technology project into a lasting institutional capability. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for preparing collections programmes for an increasingly AI-enabled future.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital art, museums face unique challenges and opportunities in presenting and preserving works that are inherently tied to technology. The term “digital art” can be applied to a variety of mediums and methodologies and poses unique exhibition, conservation and cataloguing challenges for cultural institutions that incorporate these works into their permanent collections. This presentation delves into the practical and technical considerations essential for engaging modern audiences, curating digital art exhibitions and acquiring digital artworks, using the Museum of Art + Light as a case study.