Welcome to the third issue of 2024. The year continues badly, with an ongoing war in the Middle East and another in Ukraine which have already cost tens of thousands of civilian lives and the destruction of irreplaceable cultural heritage and no end in sight for either. As a journal aimed at supporting reflective practice, we cannot stand back from the issues the world is currently facing. As a consequence, in addition to curatorship and management seen through the lenses of human resources, museum building, tourism, and urban development, we will continue to look at issues surrounding repatriation, colonialism, inclusion and sustainability, which have also been the focus of several past issues of MMC. For regular readers, this editorial introduction will be very familiar, but for those new to the journal, Museum Management and Curatorship, now in its 39th year, it is important to underline that MMC remains one of the world’s leading journals for museum professionals. When the journal was originally founded it was explicitly intended as a resource for active museum practitioners. Museums and museum professionals continue to need high-quality academic research on which to base new projects and inform current practices, and to need new methodologies to help critically analyse their success or failure. The MMC remains and will continue to remain grounded in museum practice in all its geographical and cultural diversity. The MMC is also one of the few truly international museum journals. It continues to publish contributions from around the world, and is an important platform for scholars and professionals for whom English is not a first language. The MMC is not and cannot be a news magazine, but we are always looking at how best to respond as a journal to the current world situation and its challenges to the museum mission, while still retaining the scholarly rigour of a peer-reviewed journal, which by its nature takes time and increasingly patience, as peer reviewers become harder and harder to find. This issue almost inevitably looks at the increasing amount of research into the impact of digital technology on museum practice, a trend that seems destined to continue with the explosive development of artificial intelligence and its use in the museum and heritage sector. As always, we invite all of our readers to contribute to our ongoing reflection with their own ideas by writing to the team at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you, and to working together to ensure the MMC continues to meet the needs of the entire museum field.
