Museums faced a huge financial loss due to the pandemic, but now could recover by reaching more people than before - through digitization and audience engagement. This will require long-term strategies for museums across Europe.

For some weeks, the opportunities and limits of artificial intelligence have been the subject of intense discussion both inside and outside the cultural sector. The conference "Cultures of Artificial Intelligence - New Perspectives for Museums" at the Badisches Landesmuseum (Baden State Museum) hit the zeitgeist and raised numerous questions that are worthy of discussion beyond the museum sector.

During the last two decades, art institutions have developed as centers of soft power. The book "Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy: Post Guggenheim Developments,” uses three internationally known museums as case studies to explore the complex relations held between these and how governments have evolved to promote museum-based corporate enterprises and global franchises.

Since the pandemic, the topic of "health" has received extremely heightened attention in the arts and culture sector. In addition to hygiene measures, cultural institutions can also help contain the pandemic by supporting vaccination campaigns, as examples from various museums in Brazil show.

Museums in the Arab World - holding a significant collection of the world’s cultural heritage - can reconfigure themselves as virtual platforms for their digitized artefacts and offer discussion rooms, workshops for assimilating new technologies, and spaces for intensifying regional cooperation. They would be spaces for a participatory discourse in societies under stress. To become such a "place for change,” museums must rethink their own roles, self-understandings, and capabilities. However, why museums have so far been prevented from assuming this role is not (only) due to technologies and funding.

Currently, the union of art and digital technologies is entering a new phase of relations. What opportunities does this open up for cultural organizations and projects? The Russian Fund of Cultural Projects "Thursday” shares its experience of creating the online exhibition ART-MEMORY - a socio-cultural project adapted for the Google Arts & Culture platform during the lockdown.

Re-opening a museum after the lockdown comes with many challenges and difficult decisions. As the weeks of closure have created severe financial pressure, one of these decisions is finding the right pricing tactic for the restart. Next to increased prices to recover losses and lowered prices to drive demand, "Pay As You Stay” could be a novel, attractive option for this troubled time.

The restitution of African objects in European museums has been widely debated after French President Macron’s important call in November 2017, based on the report on the ‘Restitution of African Cultural Heritage’ by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy. The publication ‘Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe’ does not provide solutions to the manifold issues raised in this debate but shows a number of useful ways forward for working with contested colonial collections across the two continents.

In recent months, events such as die-in protests, debates over sponsorships, or the acquisition of the "Baby Blimp” - a huge balloon of baby Donald Trump - have demonstrated that the role of museums is changing. But although the phrase Museum activism is used more frequently by museum professionals, there is still some ambiguity about what it means. I - successfully - set out to explore this topic by reading `Museum Activism’.

At the 3rd International Conference on Audience Research and Development, the focus was on EMOTIONS in museums. What role do they play in visitor engagement? We all know that emotions drive actions and arousing them - whether positive or negative - is the best way to achieve lasting connections to learning experiences and generating memories.

Museomix is a creative makeathon held every year, on the same weekend and in different places of the world. Elena Bertelli from Museomix Italia explains how different professionals together with volunteers and museum staff create a working space in order to design innovative mediation tools - useful to improve visitors experience, engage new audiences and help the museum staff to adopt new skills and perspectives.

This years Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO) conference took place November 10 12 at Baden State Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. 160 Participants from 36 countries came together to exchange about promising approaches on Money Matters: The Economic Value of Museums. Only a few of them dealt with new funding opportunities in the first place. Instead, the conference opened up new perspectives on measurement, cooperation and communication as premisses for a better and long-term financial coverage.

The Agenda company organised the Communicating the Museum conference on 12 - 15 July 2016 in Berlin, Germany. As is usual with these conferences, one of their main raison d'être - reasons for existing - is the opportunity to inform yourself about the latest developments in a wide ranging of topics - in this case arts communications and fundraising and to network with like-minded professionals. As such, CTM was able to provide the over 200 participants and 50 speakers from all over the world with plenty of opportunities to do so.

The DMA is committed to knowing its museum visitors better and deepening their connection with the art displayed in its collections and special exhibitions. For over 10 years, the museum has conducted research using diverse evaluative tools that support the staff in their efforts to better understand the preferences, actions and curiosities of its audiences. Through this increased knowledge, museums gain valuable insight for nurturing relationships between people, art, and museums.

Functions that are often considered secondary to museums scholarly competencies include revenue generation such as fundraising, meetings and events, museum shops etc. Over the last five decades or so, German friends associations have developed organically to fill many of these needs. In the United States, in contrast, museums fulfill these functions themselves, including their membership programs, suggesting an intriguing contrast and lessons to be learned.

Liechtenstein is one of the smallest countries in the world and most people connect it to its former status as a tax haven. We spoke with Professor Dr. Rainer Vollkommer, the director of the Liechtenstein State Museum about what it is like to direct a cultural institution with a regional focus in a country that many regard as provincial.

In many European countries, the arts, heritage and cultural sector is supported by or partially subsidized by government. However, due to the economic crisis and cuts in budget, the amount of funds for direct subsidies is decreasing. Starting from this assumption, the project Empowering Museum Professionals and Heritage Organizations Staff by cultural entrepreneurship training and research (EMPHOS) has the objective to develop entrepreneurial skills and attitude among cultural professionals.

Three months after the 39th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, participants of the Young Experts Forum 2015 have initiated the online platform "Young Heritage Experts". The aim is to act as a think tank and deliver an unprecedented international networking platform for young experts and activists around the topics of UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The stunning new home of The Library of Birmingham proved to be a fitting backdrop for The National Archives (TNA) and Research Libraries UKs (RLUK) second collaborative conference "Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities" on October 29th - 30th 2014. This years widened its scope to welcome representatives from the heritage and cultural sectors. More than 270 delegates from over 160 organisations across the UK and overseas discussed the benefits and challenges of cross-sector collaborations and the opportunities of digitality for the sake of broadening collections access for academia and the wider public alike.

Users come to Tates website with different motivations, knowledges of art, and have different preferences for browsing information online. At Tate, we have undertaken research to understand, analyse and map these users needs and expectations. We have then used this analysis to consider how we can develop more effective ways for users to find and consume our content about art, as well as enabling them to create their own experiences and meanings.