Rohan Jayasekera 

Rohan Jayasekera is currently a freelance consultant at Bexhill Museum in East Sussex. He is fascinated by information spaces of all kinds and the connections between them – actual, virtual and imagined. 

A former journalist specialising in conflict reporting and freedom of expression rights, later working on digital innovation in small-scale news media, he is currently securing funding for and directing a critical £500k top to bottom building renovation at Bexhill Museum. 

While there he has earned a post-grad certificate in Curation of Collections & Heritage with distinction from Brighton University to go with his existing master’s degrees in politics and digital media. He is now on the track for Associate status at the Museums Association. 

His side hustle: exploring the use of AI in the management of museum archives and collections documentation, using an experimental museum registry plugged into OpenAI, called Thompson, in honour of Bexhill Museum’s co-founder in 1914, the Reverend J.C. Thompson

Rohan Jayasekera is speaking at the Digital Collections Summit 2024 : 

Thompson: Building an AI-enhanced robot museum registrar  

The challenge of making sense of AI is – almost – as intimidating as making sense of 110 years of museum accession books. The only thing to do is to get up close and personally acquainted with the fountain pen scripts, the retrieval-augmented generative and the museum’s Python – both stuffed and encoded. Here’s one way to do it.