Aetopia at the Museums + Heritage Show 2026

Two days at Stand W14, and one theme came up again and again: teams want digital collections under control without adding more systems or overhead.

The Aetopia team spent this year's Museums + Heritage Show meeting people from across the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector. The Show is one of the busiest dates in the GLAM calendar, and the conversations at the stand were remarkably consistent.

Time after time, teams described the same pressure. They want simpler, more reliable ways to organise, access and manage growing digital collections, but they do not want to bolt on yet another system to do it. The overhead of running several disconnected tools, each with its own quirks, is often the problem rather than the solution.

Built around how teams work

The point we kept coming back to is that digital asset management should be structured around the way an organisation actually works, not the other way around. A GLAM team should not have to reshape its cataloguing, rights and access practices to fit a platform. The platform should fit them.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by to compare notes, whether you were weighing up options for the first time or picking up a conversation from a previous year. If you would like to continue it, you can read how we approach this for cultural and heritage organisations and across digital collections, or get in touch directly.