Digital technologies are reshaping how museums, archives, and galleries present their collections. Increasingly, exhibitions are supplemented with digital features or entirely realized in virtual formats. Digital exhibitions, as distinct online platforms, employ diverse design strategies to showcase objects. Research in this field has focused primarily on comparing the advantages and limitations of physical versus digital formats, alongside curatorial challenges, design strategies, and best practices concerning open access, accessibility, and diversity. Key studies (e.g., Kanellos et al. 2014; Schweibenz 2023; Siefkes 2022; Speakman et al. 2018) have analyzed various typologies of digital exhibitions or have analyzed specific examples of digital exhibition pages in detail, while anthologies like the one edited by Guido Fackler and Hendrikje Carius (2021) have provided interdisciplinary and methodological perspectives on the topic.

In the early hours of 26 March 2024, more than 30 people from Aotearoa New Zealand, Norfolk Island, and Scotland—and across the world—gathered for a dawn ceremony at Perth Museum. This ceremony imbued the mauri (life force) of years of collaborative work into a new display of taonga (cultural treasures) from Aotearoa New Zealand and and tao'a from Tahiti, part of the wider redevelopment and reopening of the new Perth Museum. The display encompasses five cases and an open section for the taonga Māori and, in a separate display section, a single case for an ‘ahu heva tūpāpa'u (Tahitian chief mourner's regalia). The taonga Māori include pounamu (greenstone), a kahu kākāpō (kākāpō feather cloak), weapons, taonga pūoro (musical instruments), and two carved poupou (house wall panels). The displays sit alongside a range of other new galleries displaying primarily local social history and archaeology and global material culture.

Abstract This article explores precarity and resilience in Chen Wanli's pursuit of a museum career. Through a critical biography approach, the article examines Chen's professional development in three stages through his work as a physician at Peking University (1917–1927), his tenure as a provincial head of public health (1928–1949), and his career at the Palace Museum (1949–1969). It details how Chen negotiated various professions to become a museum archaeologist, how he acquired the competences necessary for a museum career, and how his critical biography reveals the sociopolitical conditions of the museum profession in twentieth-century China. Investigating his transnational networks, the article also demonstrates how Chen became a powerhouse of ceramic archaeology and knowledge dissemination, contributing to the training of generations of Chinese museum professionals.

Abstract This article explores the everyday challenges of collaboration between community groups and heritage organizations in England. I explore how political and ideological debates about the moral principles of repatriation (and the legal and bureaucratic frameworks that continue to bolster colonial ownership and circumscribe community relations to cultural heritage) are managed within everyday working practices, conversations, and ways of being within partnerships. I focus specifically on the challenges faced by community groups to find a form that is both recognized and useful within this fraught cultural work. I write as both an anthropologist, and a long-term member of a community association, Te Maru o Hinemihi, that has been working for more than 15 years with the National Trust, the UK and Europe's largest heritage charity advocating for the care and return home of the Māori ancestress Hinemihi.

Abstract Sydney Keith-Falconer, Countess of Kintore (1851–1932), collected natural history specimens for her private museum. Her accounts of a visit to the Caribbean record her search for specimens and practical skills. Mrs. L. Latour worked in an administrative capacity for the Victoria Institute, Trinidad, from 1895 until at least 1901. The two women met briefly at the institute in 1898. Mrs. Latour's career offers evidence for a woman of color as a museum professional in nineteenth-century Trinidad. The countess's accounts of her own museological practices offer a narrative of anxious knowledge combined with the confident articulation of colonial hierarchies at the expense of Mrs. Latour. These narratives emphasize how the intersections of marginalized experiences in museums can reinforce barriers to museum practice and hierarchies of knowledge within museums.

Australia's vast collections of biological, natural history, ethnographic, and social-historical materials remain largely disconnected from each other and from the public. Connecting these distributed collections, currently dispersed in local, state, national, and global locales, is critically important to generate new knowledge for national and global benefit. The vision of making these collections accessible at scale, alongside innovative methodologies, and technologies of connection, has been the subject of discussion since the 1980s but has been hampered by institutional, geographic, and disciplinary silos and under-resourcing. In this article, we make an argument for a national research program that could enable the type of knowledge generation needed for a likely tumultuous twenty-first century. The Australian Museum and Galleries Association (AMAGA) report A New Conversation about Museum Research (Malde et al. 2023) has already begun to develop an argument for reimagining research collaborations so that they are aligned to shared public values. We argue that innovations in scholarship, often produced in close partnership with industry professionals, already point the way forward. What is needed now is to scale up these advancements in ways that can adequately transform the sector more broadly.

Abstract Objects in museum collections can be productively explored as repositories of environmental knowledge situated within particular cultural practices and ontologies. Research on a distinctive Munduruku headdress with its crown of golden feathers produced by tapirage—a remarkable Indigenous practice of changing the color of feathers on living parrots—opened up new ways of thinking about the intertwined relations between natural history specimens and artifacts, and between nature and culture. A comparative investigation of the headdress's materiality, construction, history, and use highlights its transformative potential, while providing insights into museum practice, international networks of exchange, and the fragmented and dispersed nature of “museum evidence.” The knowledge and power imbedded in museum collections can be reactivated through multidisciplinary research and collaboration with Indigenous knowledge holders.

Communication is obviously an important function for museums. Engagement with mass media is one of the indispensable ways for museums to communicate with their publics. The concept of mass media arose in the early twentieth century and refers to information dissemination accessible to all in principle, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet, and others (McQuail and Deuze 2020: 16–19). In this article, mass media mainly includes the traditional mainstream media, while social media on the Internet will not be discussed. For many people, mass media is still an essential channel for up-to-date information nowadays. In recent years, the national and global mass media has paid increasing attention to museums in China, and their reports on traditional festivals, special events, museum development and International Museum Day have achieved great prominence. However, inaccuracies and negligence in mainstream media reports about museums still occur from time to time, as seen in the case of CCTV News where an author of tomb-raiding novels was invited to a live show to discuss the archaeological excavation of the Sanxingdui Site, Sichuan (The Paper 2021). While this incident invites criticism of the professional standards of journalists, it also raises skepticism about the absence of archaeologists and museum professionals in mass communication. Are museums absent from the communication process? Are museums acting as gatekeepers when reporting on relevant content? What is the relationship between museums and mass media? In this article, I argue that “agenda-setting theory” helps to address these issues.

Abstract The process of removing cultural material to museums can augment the “nature–culture divide” by physically separating “culture” from “nature.” In this article, I consider ways of disrupting this artificial divide through the example of a journey through my local park and an examination of the displays and collections at the nearby museum where several items from the park are now housed. By describing locations like my local park more broadly as “landscapes,” which are the collaborative products of humans and nonhumans, I hope to further disrupt the “nature–culture divide.” I also argue that experiencing “nature” and “culture” has benefited my own well-being at a particularly difficult period in my life. Reconnecting museums, their collections, and activities with the landscapes where artifacts originated could help improve the well-being of others.

Exhibitions and accompanying publications are empowering and powerful vessels for maintaining and preserving Indigenous knowledges and practices for the more than 17 Moana Oceania diaspora communities living in Aotearoa New Zealand. We have had the honor of walking alongside two of these communities, Niue and Kiribati. For Niue, we had Molima Molly Pihigia QSM (Molly) as the Lead (on behalf of her group Falepipi he Mafola Niuean Handcraft Group Inc.) on the journey we took to develop and produce the exhibition and publication, both titled Fenoga Tāoga Niue i Aotearoa: Niue Heritage Journey in Aotearoa (Pihigia et al. 2023). The exhibition was first held at Māngere Arts Centre Ngā Tohu o Uenuku (MAC), in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland from 1 April to 20 May 2023; and then it toured to Pātaka Art + Museum, in Porirua, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, where it opened on 18 November 2023 running until 11 February 2024. With Kiribati, we were privileged to collaborate with I-Kiribati master makers Kaetaeta Watson and Louisa Humphry MNZM to co-curate the exhibition Tibuta – Kinaakiia Ainen Kiribati: Tibuta – Identifies Kiribati Women that was held at Pātaka Art + Museum from 7 October until 11 November 2023. We also helped to set up their publishing arm Te Rabakau Press and facilitated the production process of an accompanying publication, of the same name, launched at the closing of their exhibition (Lagi-Maama 2023).