Museums are expected to prove their social value and ability to have a long-term social impact. Hence, in order to do so, museums, as experience hubs and the most-visited cultural attraction, may use their potential to offer experiences that could help visitors thrive by increasing their psychological wellbeing. Although psychological wellbeing has been a hot topic, the synthesized and holistic review of the literature on this theme has been lacking in regard to museums. Hence, we conducted an analysis using the PRISMA protocol to answer two research questions: (1) Can museums increase the visitor’s psychological wellbeing? (2) How can the museum experience be designed to enhance the psychological wellbeing of the visitors and how can that potentially be measured? The results showed that museums can enhance visitors’ and other stakeholders’ psychological wellbeing. This can be achieved by designing museum experiences that are attractive, comfortable (restorative), comprehensible, participative, innovative, and sustainable, relying on specific detailed guidelines provided in the article. The Museum Wellbeing Toolkit serves to measure the efficiency of the proposed guidelines in stimulating the psychological wellbeing of museum visitors. If backed by wellbeing policy frameworks, museums may increase their role in fostering psychological wellbeing. As wellbeing public policies have been rather rare to date, future research may explore the effects of the existing ones to provide recommendations for new developments on the topic.

Cultural heritage is an important factor in ensuring regional development. Practice has demonstrated that first sustainability of heritage sites needs to be ensured and tourism they generate should also be re-visited as current over-tourism models are unsustainable. The assumption is that cultural/creative industries (CCI) can be a powerful tool for heritage livability as well as for sustainable tourism based on experiences. In order to stimulate regional development, specific CCI measures are often introduced in public policies but results of policy interventions are rarely monitored. Their performance can be measured against the pre-set indicators. Research studies focusing on such indicators are scarce. This short communication provides a possible conceptual framework alongside concrete indicators for cultural/creative industries’ sector impact assessment on cultural heritage and sustainable experiential tourism on the policy as well as on the project level. Desk research and brainstorming methods were applied to design the indicator sets resulting in a tool which is to be further tested and used in practice.

Most cultural heritage projects strive in ensuring financial sustainability, mainly relying on public subsidies. At the same time, they lack fund management policies which directly affects their financial sustainability. European Union heritage policies focus on sustainability but after investments have been made, there are rare cases which can boast about it. A number of heritage funding mechanisms exist which are explained in this review paper, while the focus is on crowdfunding as an alternative mechanism. The study used literature review method based on PRISMA guidelines to analyze new trends and suitability of crowdfunding for cultural heritage projects, and to detect possible factors influencing its success. The purpose was to add to the existing knowledge while offering a systematic review which can be applied in practice. Findings indicate the trend of participatory approach to heritage, which is in line with the participatory nature of crowdfunding campaigns. Further, crowdfunding suitability for cultural heritage projects was confirmed while its success factors majorly depend on the policy framework, heritage project nature and management of the campaign itself.

Cultural heritage governance and management has been shifting from the sole authority of the state and public bodies towards approaches that list multi-actor partnerships in several combinations involving public actors, civil society, private actors and community. This paper examines the public–civil, public–private and public–private–community partnerships through expounding rationales, conceptual backgrounds and theoretical framings for each partnership, followed by a systemic review and analysis of the academic literature sourced through the PRISMA protocol. The analysis objective was to assess the main advantages and disadvantages of each of the partnerships in governing and managing cultural heritage, noting the levels of representation of each governance and management approach. The results have shown that the public–civil and public–private–community partnerships have similar advantages and disadvantages, with the public–civil partnership being the least represented approach in the literature, while the public–private partnership has the highest level of representation with advantages and disadvantages that are inclined towards more pragmatic aims than those of the other two examined approaches. The so-called ‘new governance models’ of heritage were also detected in the analysis; however, they represent only a variant of the already analysed models.

Engaging senses in the museum experience design enables emotional visitor responses and makes the experience more memorable. The aim of this study was to discover a potential relationship between visual and aural stimuli and emotions to provide guidelines for the design of sensory museum experiences. To do so, the study used self-report and psychophysiological measures (skin conductance rate, zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii activity). The results indicated sound and visual stimulus to be equally accurate in inducing specific emotions on the self-report measures, while psychophysiological measures showed sound to cause higher arousal than visual stimuli for the majority of the emotions, joy to be more strongly elicited by means of sound, while sadness by visual stimuli. Guidelines for the designers of sensory museum experiences are provided at the end of the article. Future studies should try to confirm these findings on a more representative sample, using neuroimaging techniques.

Wellbeing has been researched in relation to social, wellness, rural, backpacker, senior, wildlife, transformational or transformative tourism or studies exist specifically focusing on wellbeing tourism. Surprisingly enough, there is a void of research focus on wellbeing in cultural tourism, although culture has been considered as having a substantial impact on wellbeing. The research uses the case study of the Museum of Broken Relationships (MBR) in Zagreb, Croatia, under the assumption that MBR experiences have a relevant influence on tourists’ subjective wellbeing. Subjective wellbeing was measured after the visitation using the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS) and a majority of the respondents experienced moderate to high wellbeing. Furthermore, the research aimed to investigate whether or not there is any difference between cultural and non-cultural tourists’ subjective wellbeing noted after the visitation to the Museum. The results showed that there was no substantial difference between cultural and non-cultural tourists’ subjective wellbeing.