How to Support Learning, Access and Engagement Programs for Museums and Heritage with ThingLink

Kyla Ball September 23, 2025

Museums and heritage organizations have always faced the challenge of making their collections both accessible and engaging, while also safeguarding them for future generations. With ThingLink, even the smallest institutions are able to create immersive, multilingual, and interactive digital experiences that bring artifacts, stories, and places to life for both local and global audiences. Discover how this UNESCO award-winning technology is empowering cultural organizations to preserve the past, while inspiring lifelong learning.

ThingLink’s UNESCO Prize

UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, and the UN specialized agency for education. It leads the Education 2030 Agenda, which aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” 

ThingLink is a past Winner of UNESCO’s King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize, which recognizes individuals, institutions and organizations that use digital technologies to expand educational and lifelong learning opportunities.

This award reflects ThingLink’s core mission, which has always been to democratize not only the creation of immersive learning content, but also to the access to the knowledge, understanding, skills, and experiences that are provided when this content is shared. 

UNESCO sums up the core value of content created and shared with ThingLink:

“Through [ThingLink], learners can virtually access environments beyond their physical reach, to develop cultural awareness and engage in experiential learning.”

UNESCO

It’s for this very reason that in addition to its use in K12, technical and higher education, ThingLink has increasingly been adopted by museums, libraries, cultural and heritage organizations worldwide.

How ThingLink can support cultural exchange – UNESCO

In their 2021 publication “ThingLink Visual Learning Technology: an immersive learning tool for accessible quality education”, UNESCO wrote about the role that ThingLink can play in the preservation and dissemination of world cultural heritage.  

“Preserving and digitalizing items of cultural heritage has so far relied on locally built databases and servers, which make them extremely vulnerable to the impact of a physical disaster. Image annotation provides cultural organizations a possible way to digitalize images with rich metadata that is searchable, not only locally, but via the cloud. This makes archives safer and allows benefits such as research collaboration.

Imagine: A small local museum in Africa labels images with titles and descriptive text, and a local archaeologist records brief audio clips with observations of each item. Through ThingLink, the museum can now make parts of its archives available to remote colleagues, researchers in other countries – or even the public”.

ThingLink Visual Learning Technology : an immersive learning tool for accessible quality education, UNESCO 2021 

In short, ThingLink adds value for any heritage organization by providing:

Rich, layered storytelling

One single artifact can carry multiple voices and interpretations using a range of media: a curator’s audio or video description, an archaeologist’s field notes, first hand oral history, a young person’s response to the object, and so on. ThingLink provides a digital canvas where these perspectives can all coexist.

Global research and public access

Once published, annotated images, 360 scenes, 3D objects and virtual tours can be shared with professionals and the public worldwide, bridging geographical barriers and sparking new levels of engagement and learning.

Below: An interactive 360 degree video of traditional turf harvesting techniques, created by Historic Environment Scotland with ThingLink, and shared as public access learning.

Why else are museums and heritage bodies worldwide adopting ThingLink?

The dilemma for any museum or heritage site is how to tell the stories of their artefacts, exhibitions and places in a way that is accessible, engaging and meaningful – to as many diverse audiences as possible. Access has to be balanced with the equally crucial task of caring for the items and keeping them safe, in optimal conditions to ensure they are preserved for many future generations. 

The difficult balance of these two vital responsibilities – “share” and “care” – is not just the work of famous and wealthy institutions. It’s a burden carried too by very modest organizations, with stretched budgets, and workforces bolstered by legions of volunteers. For these places, there has so far been limited scope to create rich digital catalogues, or interactive and multimedia displays, let alone virtual or augmented reality (VR and AR) experiences. 

ThingLink, however, is designed to be simple, intuitive, and accessible, and is enabling local museums with limited resources to share their collections in dynamic new ways. With ThingLink, even the smallest of the institutions that take care of our precious cultural heritage can build immersive digital environments that not only preserve artefacts and buildings, but make them both easily accessible to a global audience, and newly engaging to real-life visitors.  

Below: Promotional video for the interactive simulation created with ThingLink by the Stuhr Museum, Nebraska. Read more here.

The ease by which ThingLink interactive and XR content can be created means that the same virtual tour of an exhibition, for example, can easily be automatically translated into multiple languages (currently 30) by the viewers. Creators can also clone any piece of content, from a single richly annotated image, to an entire virtual tour or course, and clone limitless versions that are suitable for different audiences. That might be K-12 learners, professional academic specialists, community learning groups, or museum volunteers.

In addition, built-in accessibility features such an Immersive Reader and Accessibility Player give visitors and learners multiple ways to interact with content in the way that suits their needs best.

ThingLink is helping museums bridge the physical and the digital, the past and future

By lowering the barriers to digital storytelling, ThingLink continues to align with UNESCO’s mission to expand educational opportunities and support cultural exchange.

In doing so, it ensures that the world’s cultural heritage doesn’t just survive – but thrives, connecting people across borders, generations, and disciplines.

Learn more at ThingLink for Museums, Galleries and Heritage Sites