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Installation art has become mainstream in artistic practices. However, acquiring and displaying such artworks implies that curators and conservators are challenged to deal with obsolete technologies, ephemeral materials and other issues concerning care and management of these artworks. By analysing three in-depth case studies, the author sheds new light on the key concepts of traditional conservation (authenticity, artist’s intention, and the notion of ownership) while exploring how these concepts apply in contemporary art conservation. Based on original empirical research and cross-case analysis, this ground-breaking study offers a re-examination of traditional conservation values and ethics, and argues for a reassessment of the role of the conservator of contemporary art.

Nowadays, the adoption of virtual reality (VR) exhibits is increasingly common both in large and small museums because of their capability to enhance the communication of the cultural contents and to provide an engaging and fun experience to its visitors. The paper describes a user-centered design (UCD) approach for the development of a VR exhibit for the interactive exploitation of archaeological artefacts. In particular, this approach has been carried out for the development of a virtual exhibit hosted at the “Museum of the Bruttians and the Sea” of Cetraro (Italy). The main goal was to enrich the museum with a playful and educational VR exhibit able to make the visitors enjoy an immersive and attractive experience, allowing them to observe 3D archaeological artefacts in their original context of finding. The paper deals with several technical issues commonly related to the design of virtual museum exhibits that rely on off-the-shelf technologies. The proposed solutions, based on an UCD approach, can be efficiently adopted as guidelines for the development of similar VR exhibits, especially when very low budget and little free space are unavoidable design requirements.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Spaces technologies enable development of new information services operating with descriptions of museum exhibits and available cultural heritage knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a smart museum concept where information services are not limited with straightforward provision of record-based description of exhibits, as it happens in traditional museum information systems. The concept is based on services with high intelligence level when additional historical sources can be used to semantically enrich the museum collection, including knowledge acquired from visitors and museum professionals. A museum becomes a cultural space where its semantic layer makes knowledge usable and creatable by visitors and professionals. Our research focus is on applying this concept to the case study of the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. A concept prototype is created, as a mandatory development phase of complex systems engineering, to analyze the need, feasibility, and technical approach. The concept prototype follows the smart spaces approach for IoT environments and defines design solutions for creating a semantic infrastructure that transforms a given museum into its smart variant.

This study proposes a new museum archiving system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It suggests a new retrieval interface to extract emotional characteristics of the design work to enrich the archiving database. A virtual curation was organized to showcase the proposed archiving system. We focused on finding emotional signals with advanced technology because humans build trust and connect with each other through emotional cues. There are numerous characteristics of a single work of art, but we focused on the emotions that viewers can feel when they appreciate the art and share a connection with the artists who made the work. The research was focused on design works, and the metadata were designed to extract three dominant colors and match them with emotional adjectives to enrich the data on the paintings. The purpose of this study was to provide information for new techniques of color utilization that encapsulate emotional adjectives. Through this research, we developed an image retrieval system based on metadata and transformed intangible emotions of design work into data. With the emotion archiving system, we organized virtual curation, adding a Korean design history collection with emotional words.

The aim of this article proposes an innovative solution for developing a museum-guide system, which employs a voice-activated assistant paired with 3-D hologram displays, that utilizes Amazon web services (AWS) to enhance the visitor experience at the Bahrain National Museum. The proposed system uses software engineering as a service (SaaS) and involves an agile development process model with microservice architecture that adapts cloud computing capabilities to provide scalability, reliability, and maintainability. The proposed system enhances the existing museum infrastructure and databases through a flexible, API-based architecture. The proposed system is highly adaptable and flexible in different desirable aspects of user experience goals. The implementation results proved that the system is highly reliable, adaptable, and efficient and has the potential to improve the user experience by transforming the way museum visitors explore and interact with user interfaces of the museum-guide system.

As makerspaces and hackerspaces pop up in libraries and museums, one little lab sits in the middle of an Information School, but it is not a maker-space, a gallery, or a museum. The MuseLab, at the Kent State School of Information, is something else, something new—or perhaps something familiar, but situated in a different context, making it less easy to define. The MuseLab is a laboratory for museum studies, where museality—the characteristic of something that in one reality documents another reality—is at the heart of all our activities. Created around design thinking principles and propositions of emergence and openness, the MuseLab is truly a space for experimentation, practice, and breaking rules in the interest of learning, innovating, and discovery. As more and more higher education courses go online, face-to-face creative group activities are becoming scarce. The story of the lab’s genesis and development may be of interest for other LIS schools, programs, teachers, and information practitioners.

Museum Information Systems (MIS) often rely on manual classification and keyword search, limiting accuracy and scalability. Deep learning offers a solution, but effective integration requires alignment with curatorial workflows. This study proposes a model-driven framework for integrating Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) into MIS to enhance artifact classification and retrieval. A prototype was built using ReactJS, Django, and TensorFlow, and it was trained on a curated subset of The Met's Open Access Images. The system employs a Hybrid-E Loss for improved classification accuracy. The model achieved 94.3% classification accuracy and real-time retrieval latency below 100 ms, with throughput exceeding 14 queries per second. The framework successfully bridges AI performance with curatorial logic, demonstrating a scalable and interpretable solution for digital heritage systems.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a new management approach to analyse the processes of museums in the experience logic and, on the basis of such a model, to study the management processes of the National Gallery of the Marches in Urbino, one of the most important museums in Italy.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopted a qualitative methodology and a descriptive-exploratory approach. The proposed model, which aimed to create and manage experiences and transformations in museums, was tested in the National Gallery of the Marches by adopting the case study method.FindingsThe empirical research underlined the partial application of the proposed model in the museum under examination and the potential for the museum to improve the offering value to its visitors.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough a single case was investigated, the present work offers a preliminary theoretical contribution, which is useful for perfecting the conceptual framework and applying it to a wider number of cases.Practical implicationsThe management of the National Gallery of the Marches should first plan a greater number of more detailed experiences and transformations around the theme of the Renaissance, and promote the active role of visitors. Second, it should improve the communication of the offer, especially through social networks. Third, personnel (especially front office) should be motivated and trained to create value for visitors.Originality/valueThe paper aims at developing a new management approach for the museums to create value for the visitors and museums by bringing the insight of the experience logic into the field of cultural heritage management.

The existing wide spectrum of embedded, multimedia, and mobile equipment provides an effective base for making museums smart or intelligent. By using the Internet of Things technology and the smart spaces paradigm the distance can be shortened between exhibits and their descriptive information on one side and consumers and providers of this information on the other side. In this paper, the authors discuss a smart museum concept and present a semantic approach to design of advanced information services for smart museums. The central point is introduction of the semantic layer to create a semantic network. The proposed approach reduces the semantic layer development to the following components: software infrastructure, semantic layer ontology, and mobile user access. For these components the authors provide design solutions, which are analyzed in respect to particular services for the History Museum of Petrozavodsk State University. The semantic approach can be applied to development of many museum services as well as in various digital environments of museums and cultural heritage areas.