The Collection Sharing Project

An estimated 90% of the world’s museum collections, mainly held in the Global North, rest idle in storage while much of the world lacks access to them. These holdings incur significant and growing costs, with collection management historically accounting for up to two-thirds of museum operating expenses. Despite advances in cataloguing and digitization, much of this material remains unseen, underused, and insufficiently documented or researched.

This situation reflects a broader global imbalance in cultural access and influence. The Global North, with about two-thirds of the world’s museums but only 16% of the global population, holds a disproportionate share of collections, while many institutions in the Global South have limited access to international holdings and focus primarily on local heritage. This uneven access shapes whose histories are preserved, studied, and shared globally, reinforcing long-standing inequalities in cultural visibility, research capacity, and knowledge production.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) provide an opportunity to rethink how collections are used and shared at scale. Rather than treating collections as isolated institutional assets, AI-enabled systems can help connect distributed datasets, surface thematic relationships, and support decisions around loans, research access, and collaboration, unlocking new cultural, educational, and research value from materials currently held in storage.

Realizing this potential requires more than technological innovation. It calls for new models of collaboration, knowledge exchange, and shared stewardship that reposition collections as global cultural resources. To that end, we aim to convene international partners to co-develop governance approaches, research directions, and practical implementation pathways that balance access, equity, and institutional sustainability, that complement ongoing repatriation and restitution efforts.

To promote broad engagement in the project, the Casablanca meeting will convene and expand an international network of museum professionals, cultural heritage experts, information scientists, and policy stakeholders working across the Global North and Global South.

Aligning on a shared vision and developing principles, research frameworks, and partnership models that address the ethical, legal, financial, and technical dimensions of large-scale collection exchange, as well as a preliminary governance framework to support long-term collaboration across institutions.

The meeting will produce a White Paper outlining the initiative’s vision, objectives, interdisciplinary collaboration framwork, consrtium formation process, and governance and partnership models for global collection sharing. It will also lay the foundation for a long-term research international initiative and future pilot phases focused on developing an AI-enabled platform for equitable and sustainable museum collection exchange.