Digital transformation as a strategic goal is not new in the cultural heritage sector, yet it gained momentum due to COVID-19. This is reflected in policies and national strategies across Europe, where digitalisation is often seen as key to sustainable development. This study focuses on small heritage institutions in peripheral settings and explores the opportunities and limitations of digitalisation and its impact on sustainable regional development. A mixed-methods approach was applied, including a literature review, an online survey, focus groups, and a stakeholder interview, complemented by a case study. The findings show an uneven distribution of the perceived benefits, depending on funding, staff, and location. Nevertheless, digital transformation has positive social impacts by enhancing access to, participation in, and awareness of cultural heritage and therefore well-being. However, its economic effects in peripheral regions should not be overestimated. Digitalisation’s ecological impact on sustainable regional development is an underrepresented topic in the literature. Moreover, digitalisation is particularly challenging in peripheral regions and for smaller institutions with limited resources and should not be regarded as a guaranteed pathway towards sustainability. This paper contributes to an emerging field by examining the intersection of heritage institutions, digitalisation, and sustainable regional development in peripheral areas.

This paper explores the characteristics of born digital objects and how their materiality is framed and transformed in the musealization process. It draws on vibrant materialism and web archiving, framing born digital objects as assemblages and proposing a distinction between these and reborn digital objects, i.e. their collected counterparts. The paper relates this new framing of digital objects to established museological frameworks, such as analyses of the musealization process through the lenses of semiotics and research on authenticity in relation to digital reproductions, in order to unpick the ontological and epistemological transformation this contemporary form of heritage undergoes in entering the museum.

This paper draws on a survey of contemporary collecting projects aiming to document the COVID-19 pandemic in museums and other memory organizations. The survey focused on European memory organizations and investigated the practices they adopted in collecting, accessioning, recording, preserving, and displaying material and immaterial witnesses of the pandemic. This paper presents the results of the survey, with a particular attention on the challenges faced by these projects in relation to born-digital objects. It discusses how organizations were able to quickly launch initiatives aimed at collecting memories of the pandemic, drawing on different collection methods, adapting to the circumstances, and using a proactive attitude to reach out to different communities. The paper highlights the solutions adopted to ensure legal compliance in these projects and discusses the need for ethical considerations in relation to the collection of traumatic memories. It suggests that these collecting projects are likely to face significant challenges in the subsequent processing of this material—due to its volume and the need for new digital curation and preservation workflows. Therefore, the paper argues that these projects could also lead to a renewed attention and collaboration across the heritage sector on issues of digital curation and preservation.

This paper discusses the emergence, and impact, of public perceptions of Ancient Egypt and diverse ideas of “magic” at the Manchester Museum, following the huge response to the episode of the “spinning statuette.” In June 2013, a video of an Egyptian statuette spinning of its own accord in its case in the Egypt Gallery of the Manchester Museum went viral. During the media storm that followed the publication of the video, many hinted at a “magic event,” which could be related to popular perceptions of Ancient Egypt: ideas from movies and popular culture were widely used to explain and comment, often ironically, on the episode. At the same time, in the museum galleries people were jostling to see the statuette and questioning the museum staff. Therefore, this paper will observe how media and museum audiences have used the concept of “magic” in relation to the spinning statuette: what beliefs and attitudes towards “magic” emerge from these comments? Why was the museum criticized for suggesting a “magic” connection? And what have been the outcomes of the episode for the museum and for our understanding of public perceptions of Ancient Egypt?

Developments in the digital field have introduced new opportunities not only for museums to engage with their visitors, but also for researchers to learn about visitors’ experiences through their online behaviour. This article discusses how the mediation and perception of exhibited photographs in museums can be researched through an analysis of Instagram posts, using text-mining methods. A case study examining the World Press Photo 20 exhibition at the WestLicht museum in Vienna was used to explore three different framings of the World Press photos: first, how the photographs were initially used within newspaper articles as a news source; second, how the museum communicated the exhibited photos on social media; and third, how visitors reflected on the exhibition and the museum visit on Instagram.