Museums increasingly recognize the need to address advances in digital culture which impact the expectations and needs of their audiences. Museum collections of real objects need to be presented both on their own premises and digitally online, especially as digital and social media becomes more and more influential in people’s everyday lives. From interdisciplinary perspectives across digital culture, art, and technology, we investigate these challenges magnified by advances in digital and computational media and culture, looking particularly at recent and relevant reports on changes in the ways museums interact with the public. We focus on human digital behavior, experience, and interaction in museums in the context of art, artists, and human engagement with art, using the observational perspectives of the authors as a basis for discussion. Our research shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many of the changes driving museum transformation, about which this paper presents a landscape view of its characteristics and challenges. Our evidence shows that museums will need to be more prepared than ever to adapt to unabated technological advances set in the midst of cultural and social revolution, now intrinsic to the digital landscape in which museums are inevitably connected and participating across the global digital ecosystem where they inevitably find themselves entrenched, underscoring the central importance of an inclusive integrative museum model between physical and digital reality.

This paper looks at key elements of global culture that are driving a new paradigm shift in museums causing them to question their raison d’être, their design and physical space, recognizing the need to accommodate visitor interaction and participation, and to reprioritize institutional outcomes and goals reexamining their priorities. As heritage sharing in online spaces reaches across national, political, and social boundaries on platforms and networks, this has been driven by museum engagement with Internet life during the pandemic. Museum relationships and interactions with communities both local and global continue to challenge core values and precepts, leading to radical changes in how museums define their roles and responsibilities. In this new cultural landscape, museums are responding to human digital identity in a tidal wave of human interactions on the Internet, from social media to online sharing of images and videos. This is revealing shared perspectives on cultural conflict as being tied to freedom of expression of one’s heritage embedded in digital identity.

This paper takes a landscape view of archives practice now operating in a sea of human digital behavior, interacting with computational systems embedded in real and virtual life, part of our complex global digital ecosystem driving cultural and social change. We envision a new computational archives framework, designed to be user-centric, in ways that integrate traditional archival practice into an overarching computational framework incorporating structured and unstructured data, computational tools,AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), robotics, and automation intended to aid in management and public engagement with physical, digitized, and born-digital documents. Set in a networked environment of increasing computing power, this “more than human” system derives from the latest computing advances fromNLP (natural language processing)and image recognition to artificial neural networks. We envision an archives system that is at once complex and integrated into a new inclusive and diverse cultural fabric. This paper covers general issues that have been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, together with two institutional case studies.