Casting Memories confronts the impact and legacy of looted art and white supremacy in museums through the perspective and intimate experience of a Nigerian artist / technologist / scammer learning about their stolen history and identity through the Benin Bronzes in the Smithsonian collections. To illustrate how creativity can be used to transform, reclaim and...

Doorways into Open Access is an augmented reality experience that transports audiences back a century to Paris of “La Belle Epoque,” a golden era that began in the early 1870s and lasted through the beginning of WWI in 1914. Downloading the app opens a virtual portal to 1912, inviting travelers to learn about artifacts of...

Treasure Hunt: Space Mission is a multiplayer treasure hunt game that offers players an interactive, social learning experience utilizing artifacts from the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections. Players discover, authenticate, and collect digital artifacts to score points and win the game, while learning from each other in the process. ABOUT THE TEAM: ScienceVR creates a delightful...

Thanks to Writing with Open Access, you can explore the Smithsonian’s vast Open Access collections guided by your thoughts. Write something. Wait a moment, and a collage of related images will appear. Whether for creative inspiration, scholarly research, or to tackle writer’s block, this novel, web-based interface helps generate new ideas, and supports ten languages....

A note: This article was co-written by Angela Perrone, Katherine Miller, and Rachel Ginsberg before the events of the past few weeks, in a world that feels yet again very different. Rather than rewriting, we’ve decided to publish as is. We stand in solidarity with those organizing against institutionalized racism and discrimination in all forms,...

When we first began to build out our plans for the Interaction Lab, we were already certain public programs would play a big role in our work. We conceived of our public programs to convene a variety of audiences for shared learning, exploration, and discussion on topics related to our work reimagining the visitor experience...

Fantastically good at inspiring and educating visitors as trusted collectors and conservators of history, museums amplify cultural access by presenting stories and ideas that provoke rich dialogue about the past, present, and future.  In fact, according to the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), museums are considered to be the most trustworthy source of information around,...