Museums have fostered arts and humanities research since the earliest phases of their establishment, when they evolved from private collections into public institutions. Among memory institutions, they also have a privileged relationship with their public(s), particularly when they become landmarks within a city or even a nation. This is likely due to the simple fact that objects are visually compelling and evoke stories more easily than books in libraries or documents in archives. As a result, museums have to respond to a wide range of interests, curiosities, and needs; at the same time, they possess a potential for engagement far greater than that of other institutions, both on-site and through their digital dimension. Museum websites and portals need to be designed to serve users with diverse competencies and motivations.

Nevertheless, museums produce and store far more data than is made available through public user interfaces. This data extends well beyond curatorial departments and their museum catalogues, to include data on the institutions themselves and their exhibitions over time, as well as data produced through conservation and restoration practices, and nowadays also heritage science, applied to individual objects. In parallel, academic research generates large volumes of data through the study of museum objects–whether examining their history, significance, or materiality or performing computational analyses of digital images. Most of this research is only partially disseminated through publications, while much of the underlying data remains confined to university servers or project-specific digital humanities websites, often with limited prospects for long-term sustainability, being too dependent on project leaders rather than institutions.

While much research data on objects - both in museums and in academia - remains unlinked from online digital collections and inaccessible to the public, Open Science principles call for FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data; advances in technology, with Linked Open Data, IIIF, high-resolution imaging, 3D and H-BIM, computer vision, promise to better support information management and knowledge creation; national and transnational infrastructures are being developed with substantial public investment.

Over the past few years, the European data space for cultural heritage and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, supported by the European Union, have opened up new scenarios as digital environments based on decentralisation, in which cultural heritage institutions retain sovereignty over their own data, and remain the primary drivers of public engagement. These initiatives have also underscored the need to understand what cultural heritage institutions ultimately bring to their stakeholders, also in terms of data sharing, while expanding their potential reach through the services offered by the European data space–such as the Europeana.eu platform and a catalogue for datasets–and improving efficiency through tools offered by the Collaborative Cloud for preservation, restoration, conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage.

Libraries, long at the forefront of digitisation and initiatives such as data labs, have also taken the first steps towards engaging with these emerging digital environments. This panel–supported by the Europeana Research Community–aims to bring together diverse experiences with digital collections from internationally renowned museums; to foster discussion on connections with research within and beyond academia; to help define data flows from individual institutions to broader digital environments, and back again, for the benefit of institutions’ stakeholders.

After an introduction, the panel will feature:

• Institutional practices related to museums’ digital transformation, emerging from The Art Museum in the Digital Age, a series of international conferences organised by the Belvedere Research Center since 2019. This centre’s peculiarity lies in its being embedded in a museum.

• The innovative experience of the Rijksmuseum, focusing on the development of its new Online Collection launched in 2024, which is based on Linked Open Data and supports both discovery and creation, including through a new AI-powered tool. The presentation will also address the museum’s ambitions about implementing FAIR data and managing heritage science data.

• The perspective of researchers, with a focus on AI as a cultural phenomenon with implications for the humanities, especially in the field of visual culture, and AI applied to fragmented and hybrid data to generate accounts of artistic production across cultures and time periods.

• The case of the Digital Library supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture, which serves as the national infrastructure for managing, enriching, and connecting cultural heritage data within the largest ongoing digitisation programme in Europe, and has recently been designated as Italy’s national aggregator for Europeana.eu. The practical case at hand will be the Capodimonte Museum, as one of Italy’s largest national museums, unique in having an attached research centre for humanities research, and in hosting a heritage science lab.

• Q/A session.