Open research questions in Museums and Cultural Heritage

What the literature leaves open

• Based on the findings, several recommendations can be made to museum managers, cultural heritage policymakers, and tourism planners. Given that the museum experience significantly influences attitudes towards tangible cultural heritage, museum managers need to develop layered experience strategies tailored to visitor profiles. In this context, the adoption of visual materials and interactive guidance for visitors with lower levels of education, and digital tools such as augmented reality and virtual reality for younger visitors, is crucial. In Kazakhstan, integrating heritage site management with the museum experience, raising exhibition standards, and developing multilingual guiding services will directly enhance the quality of the experience for foreign tourists. Future studies should include comparative analyses based on museum types, work with international samples, adopt longitudinal designs, and utilize mixed methods approaches, all of which will make valuable contributions to the field.

  Museum Experiences and Attitudes Toward Tangible Cultural Heritage in Kazakhstan: Evidence from Domestic and International Tourists · 2026 · DOI

• While this study is valuable for its findings, it has several limitations. First, the study's use of convenience sampling limits the generalizability of its findings to all museum visitors in Kazakhstan. Random sampling methods can help reach a broader, more representative segment of the population (Babbie, 2020). Second, using only quantitative measurement tools in the study limits the ability to capture in-depth statements from participants about their museum experience and heritage attitudes. Adopting qualitative or mixed methods approaches in future studies will help close this gap. Third, the study has a limited focus on a single country and a specific time, ignoring differences in seasonal visitor behavior. Fourth, evaluating the overall experience without differentiating among museum types prevents identifying effects specific to museum types. Fifth, considering that the regression model explains only a portion of the variance in the dependent variable, including variables such as cultural identity, sense of belonging, and prior heritage experience in future studies could significantly increase its explanatory power.

  Museum Experiences and Attitudes Toward Tangible Cultural Heritage in Kazakhstan: Evidence from Domestic and International Tourists · 2026 · DOI

• Like many other heritage institutions, the museums within the National Historical Museums are increasingly exploring the use of AI, both in order to enrich digital collections with metadata for new research, and perhaps even more so for curatorial potential (Villaespesa et al. 2019). Prior to establishing the Swedish Holocaust Museum, the governmental institution produced, together with the organisation Jewish Culture in Sweden, the exhibition Speaking Memories – The Last Witnesses of the Holocaust, which partly merged into the new museum. This exhibition incorporated recordings of two Holocaust survivors, Pinchas Gutter and Eva Schloss, using the DiT technology developed by the University of Southern California (USC) Shoah Foundation. The technology relies on two key forms of artificial intelligence: natural language processing, which enables the system to interpret visitors’ spoken questions, and machine learning, which matches these to a large database of pre-recorded answers provided by the survivors. After the Speaking Memories exhibition, the National Historical Museums received a government assignment to produce two Swedish-language interactive biographies with Holocaust survivors, using the same technology (Swedish Government Assignment 2020). Tobias Rawet and Elisabeth Citrom were the Holocaust survivors interviewed in Swedish in this format. DiT’s format of affective and inquiry-based pedagogy was outlined by the museum as superior to merely reading facts about the Holocaust, or as the teacher’s manual from the museum in 2022 phrases it, “hopefully makes the Aavaranta, Almevik et al: AI Definitions in Flux 45 Culture Unbound 18 (1) work more enjoyable and strengthens their [the students’] desire to learn more” (National Historical Museums 2022). The intent was to inspire students to learn about the Holocaust through “curiosity” (National Historical Museums, personal communication, 3 June 2022). A sense of relational authenticity was central to the pedagogy, with interaction fostering deeper learning through empathy. Yet, an overemphasis on relational authenticity in a museum context can be problematic, as illustrated in an internal email exchange from 2022. In the discussion, a producer and an educator discuss small talk within DiT interactions, suggesting that such small moments are valuable, to help students “gain an increased feeling of meeting a real person”. In response, the other person remarks pointedly: “Perhaps it should be clarified that these are in fact real individuals, and not merely the impression of meeting someone real?” (ibid.). In its early years, the promotion during the planning stages of the installation emphasised AI as a buzzword, leveraging its positive connotations as the exhibition was widely marketed as “creative AI installations”, “AI experience”, or just “AI installation” throughout 2021 (National Historical Museums 2021).

  AI Definitions in Flux: · 2026 · DOI

• Digital media and immersive technologies are promoted as ways to enrich intangible cultural heritage (ICH) experiences in cultural tourism, yet their experiential value remains unexplored or is perceived as unnecessary.

  Participatory, purposeful, and digitally smart: a bottom-up approach to designing intangible cultural heritage tourism experiences · 2026 · DOI

• Engagement in decolonial curation can nurture a contemporary epistemic justice movement in which museums are encouraged through institutional practices, foundational documents, and umbrella policies to acknowledge, address, and perhaps be inspired by governance issues concerning the shared heritage of diverse peoples in contextually relevant and community-responsive ways[14]. Such engagement might facilitate the articulation of successful contemporary curatorial practices while informing what remains unachieved institutionally [15]. Eyewitness documentation and oral history are important modes of research and contemporaneous recording that might accompany the arrival of new collections of artefacts and data, establishing their historical and cultural provenance and significance determining the reasons for acquisition before evaluating whether the objects are still perceived to be culturally and socially relevant items of heritage and expertise [16].

  Decolonial Curatorial Methods: Impacts on Collections, Narratives, and Publics · 2026 · DOI

• The projects described here do not represent the totality of all of the critical cataloguing work that has taken place, and continues to take place, in museums and with museum collections data. First, this research examines working taking place in English-speaking UK, USA, and Canada. The linguistic scope reflects the author’s primary language, and the geographic scope represents the locations of the institutions identified during the literature review as well as those of the participants whose involvement was secured during the recruitment phase of the research. The geographic scope of research participants also likely reflects the position of the researcher being based in the UK and having a history of work and study in North America. This focus does not intend to suggest that these are the only areas in which critical cataloguing work is occurring in museums, but instead represents the range of information and sources that the author was able to engage with using the methods described above. Second, there is work occurring that is difficult to learn about because knowledge about it has not been published or made publicly available. For example, a blog post about a survey on cataloguing queer heritage in UK museums points at the existence of LGBTQIA+- focused critical cataloguing in a number of museums, but details about what is taking place or where are not available. The only available information about some projects appears to be through news articles (as discussed above) or references made within other articles, such as the Field Museum developing a disclaimer statement for their collection (Briscoe et al. 2022) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York being listed as museums working on adding artists demographic data to catalogue records by SFMOMA.35 In all of these cases, the coverage or mentions of the projects do not provide insight into decisions or actions, they only serve to make known that critical cataloguing work of some kind took place. What all of this does do, though, is give credence to the hypothesis that there is, and has been, critical cataloguing work taking place in museums that is not yet widely known. Finally, there is critical work taking place in museums that may involve critical cataloguing but which is not discussed under this framing. For example, this was hinted at when participants discussed what they saw as related institutional work but not critical cataloguing, and there is extensive literature on co-curation and other community collaborative work in museums which may involve a cataloguing component. However, while this related work may offer additional subcategories to the taxonomy, the alignment between existing literature and interview responses in regards to the major category types gives confidence that the structure of this taxonomy is consistent with the kinds of critical cataloguing work that are happening in museums today.

  Structuring Critical Cataloguing in Museums · 2026 · DOI

• The results of this study are reliant on two participants’ self-reported retrospective experi- ences. Human memory may be inaccurate or incomplete, which may affect the precision of this study. Additionally, self-reported experiences are inherently subjective. However, Desimone (2009) explains there is evidence that a ‘well-constructed and administered inter- 1 3Research in Science Education view … can provide similarly useful data’ (p. 109) as other methods of data collection such as observations. As the research question was to consider how the CML can be used to understand informal teacher professional development whilst accompanying science centre field trips, using teachers’ self-reported experiences allowed this question to be answered. However, these findings may not be applicable to teachers undertaking different styles of field trips, such as personally guiding their students through a science museum. Further research would need to be conducted to determine the transferability of these findings to other types of settings. In future, research that includes multiple methods of data collection, such as pre- and post-assessments as well as observational studies, would allow a more detailed study of teachers’ experiences to be undertaken with respect to teachers’ pre-existing professional development needs and the various factors of the CML, as well as allow teachers’ self- reported experiences to be triangulated through multiple methods of data collection (Cohen et al., 2018). Additionally, various styles of field trips could be considered, allowing for a greater transferability of the findings.

  Using the Contextual Model of Learning to Examine Informal Teacher Professional Development Whilst Accompanying Science Centre Field Trips · 2026 · DOI

• Preschoolers, accompanied by their families, represent a highly under-researched demographic in dark heritage sites, due to the sensitive and challenging historical topics associated with these venues and exhibitions, as well as the ethical and methodological considerations pertinent to this unique visitor group.

  Tiny witnesses: Preschoolers’ embodied encounters with dark heritage and parental silence in a Chinese Art Museum · 2025 · DOI

• The review identifies there is limited evidence pertaining to children's visits to STEM museums and a need for theoretically robust empirical research with children, museum educators, teachers and parents from diverse communities.

  Young Children's Engagement with Objects in Science Museums: A Rapid Evidence Assessment of Research · 2023 · DOI

• Understanding social issues, remembering the past, exploring the ecosystem, acting on change and imagining futures are the invisible problems launched for debate through the creative laboratory of the members of the ArtiViStory Collective whose artworks could be explored within the exhibition.

  The Museum as a Catalyst of Community. Case Study: The Exhibition Imagining Futures: Urban Comics From Artivistory Collective at the Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca · 2023 · DOI

• With this perspective, we contribute to broadening the scholarship that challenges the division between positive and negative emotions, which continues to be foregrounded in leisure scholarship, arguing that such binary framework does not account for the granularity and complexity of emotional worlds.

  Affective atmospheres in children’s museum experiences · 2023 · DOI

• In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards allows us to perceive dynamics of racialized and gendered labor and laborers who, in an echo of their architectural focus on minor, peripheral spaces and shadows, hover between the underrecognized and oft-neglected, thereby allowing viewers to sense the ways that the modern museum has acted as an instrument of discipline and racial hierarchization.

  Sensing Brownness · 2022 · DOI

• The rise in the twenty-first century of sound studies, the scholarly exploration of how we relate to our environment through the sense of hearing –makes no distinction between music, sound, noise or even silence !

  How Do We Listen To Museums? · 2019 · DOI

• Similarly, from an academic perspective concentrating on the aural dimension, to date, there has been little research on sound in museums: musicology and sociology have rarely studied specific areas of music reception such as museums, despite a relatively constant presence of concerts and other events in many institutions, whether in specific auditoriums or in their galleries.

  How Do We Listen To Museums? · 2019 · DOI

• The resulting collaboration reveals the deeply authentic, if under-recognized, relationship between curatorial practice and art education practice and offers a compelling case for breaking down traditional barriers between curators and museum educators in order to create a generative space in which to cultivate student curators across multiple disciplines.

  Cultivating curatorial habits of mind through studentcreated exhibitions · 2017 · DOI

• Using a survey, interviews, and focus groups with local residents, the authors found that accessibility at MONA is defined along familiar socioeconomic lines, though there are indications of change that warrant further investigation.

  It's a Museum, But Not as We Know It: Issues for Local Residents Accessing the Museum of Old and New Art · 2017 · DOI

• Exhibitions can have great transformational power; why don’t they exercise that power more often? Have museums not fully understood exhibitions as a medium? Have we not devoted enough attention to the full repertoire of visitor feelings? Have visitors been telling us this and we have failed to listen? For many people, museums play many roles in their lives; for most others few or none.

  Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance · 2010 · DOI

• Conditions for a more significant activation of museums in their local communities (in the sense of creating and carrying out programs that are wanted and needed by the audience) will only be fulfilled in Serbia when museology achieves its own standing, and grows from an underrecognized and neglected subdiscipline that even its practitioners are ashamed of, into a theoretically grounded professional and scholarly work it is in other countries.

  Museology in a Vacuum · 2006 · DOI

• Since arts administrators have not been studied in the context of LIS research before, understanding more about where they go for information, what factors influence the level of effort they are willing to invest in seeking information, and how they decide when they have “enough” information provides insights into the information‐seeking behavior of a new user group.

  When is “enough” enough? Modeling the information‐seeking and stopping behavior of senior arts administrators · 2004 · DOI

• Although little known today, the 1928 Canadian movie, Saving the Sagas, is an early example of a film recording the presence of the ethnographic fieldworker, in this case, the National Museum of Canada ethnologist Marius Barbeau (1883–1969) at work in the Nisga'a communities along the Nass River in northern British Columbia.

  Tin cans and machinery:<i>Saving the Sagas</i>and other stuff · 1999 · DOI

• In general, the results of this test series were not as dramatic as antic- 186 VIIIl2 1965 ipated, though some worthwhile observations in the realm of display techniques are warranted.

  Systematic Testing of Display Techniques for an Anthropological Exhibit¹ · 1965 · DOI

• Based on these findings, future research is recommended to expand the scope of investigation by including multiple museums in different regions to improve the generalizability of the results.

  The Influence of Digital Interactive Media and Immersive Experiences on Visitors' Educational Experiences at the Jakarta Maritime Museum · 2026 · DOI

• Despite the recent increased focus on science communication within the geosciences, the significance and effectiveness of highlighting such geocultural connections in communicating about Quaternary geoheritage sites have rarely been examined experimentally.

  Including cultural context improves communication outcomes for quaternary geoheritage: evidence from southeast Arabia · 2026 · DOI

• systems, automated interpretation and summarization Missions, challenges, and rewards for visitors; educational games; hybrid museum experiences; remote access; accessibility solutions; audience diversification; new tourism and monetisation…

  Mapping Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation in Museums · 2026 · DOI

• They started to think about what the deceased would say if they were asked for their approval for their remains to be displayed to the public after death.

  The Ethical Practice of Displaying Human Remains in Egyptian Museums · 2024 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Museums and Cultural Heritage

• On souvenirs and metonymy · Tourist Studies · 2005 · 142 citations
• Exploration, Explanation, and Parent–Child Interaction in Museums · Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2020 · 125 citations
• The Evolution of Digital Cultural Heritage Research: Identifying Key Trends, Hotspots, and Challenges through Bibliometric Analysis · Sustainability · 2024 · 109 citations
• Digital Responses of UK Museum Exhibitions to the COVID‐19 Crisis, March – June 2020 · Curator The Museum Journal · 2021 · 74 citations
• When is “enough” enough? Modeling the information‐seeking and stopping behavior of senior arts administrators · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2004 · 72 citations
• Evaluation of Touchable 3D‐Printed Replicas in Museums · Curator The Museum Journal · 2017 · 70 citations
• The impact of COVID-19 on museums in the digital era: Practices and challenges in Hong Kong · Library Hi Tech · 2022 · 54 citations
• Sensing Brownness · Afterimage · 2022 · 53 citations
• Zining as artful method: Facilitating zines as participatory action research within art museums · Action Research · 2021 · 34 citations
• Decolonizing Museums: Toward a Paradigm Shift · Annual Review of Anthropology · 2023 · 31 citations

Most recent work

• Digital Museums as Learning Platforms: Assessing Their Impact on Historical Education · Jurnal Pendidikan Humaniora · 2026
• Exploring the Digital Transformation Dilemma of Chinese Museums: A Comparative Study · Curator The Museum Journal · 2026
• Education as Evaluation: Centering Visitors’ Voices · Journal of Museum Education · 2026
• How Child-Friendly Are Art Museums? A Landscape Review of Programs and Initiatives in the 100 Most Visited Art Museums · Journal of Museum Education · 2026
• Reflections on the Evolution of Evaluation in Museum Education · Journal of Museum Education · 2026
• Evaluation Practices and Increasing Belonging in Museum Education Experiences · Journal of Museum Education · 2026
• Multisensory Museum Education for All: A Multiple Case Study of Object-Centered Learning in Museums · Society for Art Education of Korea · 2026
• AI-guided and human-guided tours in museum educational tourism: mechanisms of teenagers’ long-term memory formation · Tourism Review · 2026
• Mapping Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation in Museums · APPLIED RESEARCH IN ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCES · 2026
• Storytelling influence: how digital narratives foster prosocial behavior in museums · Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology · 2026

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