Will Heritage Still Be Part of Our Lives in 2045?

Cultural practices in 2045 will be as different from ours as ours are from those of 2005. At that time, YouTube did not exist, no one had a smartphone, and content creation was reserved for professionals. For heritage to remain alive in future practices, we must act now, without knowing exactly what those practices will be. This is both the paradox and the urgency.

A transformation that goes beyond technology

Museums and heritage institutions are currently undergoing a profound transformation that calls into question their very foundations. This transformation is not merely technical—it strikes at the heart of their mission: making heritage accessible while respecting each person’s cultural rights to participate in cultural life. The issue is not the museum of today, but that of 2045.

The Council of Europe’s Faro Convention, adopted in 2005, offers a valuable conceptual framework for thinking about this transformation. Its very first article affirms that cultural heritage plays “a fundamental role in building a peaceful and democratic society.” Most importantly, it recognises every person’s “right to engage with the cultural heritage of their choice.” This democratic requirement directly challenges current—and future—heritage practices.

The 5% impasse: when physical scarcity hinders democratic access

Museums display on average 5% of their collections. This reality, known to all curators, reveals a fundamental tension: how can we reconcile heritage accumulation with the democratic imperative of access to culture? The museum has historically been built on a model of scarcity and selection. A few chosen works, presented along a path designed by experts, constitute the classic museum experience. But this model rests on an asymmetry: on one side, the experts who choose; on the other, the visitors who receive.

This configuration is not neutral. It places the museum within what Walter Benjamin identified as “the authority of its unique presence”—a form of aura that certainly legitimises the institution, but can also create distance. The reserves overflow with works recognised by experts but invisible to the general public. This separation between what deserves to be seen and what must remain hidden raises a political question: who decides what constitutes our common heritage?

Cultural rights, as defined in the Fribourg Declaration (2007), affirm every person’s right to “participate in the cultural life of their choice.” The Faro Convention goes further by introducing the concept of “heritage community”: people who attach value to specific aspects of heritage that they wish to maintain and transmit. But how can these communities form and act when 95% of collections remain inaccessible?

This situation is not viable if we take the democratic requirement seriously. Digital technology offers precisely the possibility of escaping this impasse without abandoning the quality of the physical museum experience—on the contrary, by strengthening it.

Digitisation efforts: a necessary but insufficient foundation

It would be unfair to act as if nothing existed. For over twenty years, the Ministry of Culture has supported the digitisation of heritage collections with structural tools and mechanisms. The Open Heritage Platform (POP), launched in 2019, allows French museums to upload their data to Joconde, the collective catalogue of collections. The Programme for Digitisation and Valorisation of Cultural Content (PNV) provides financial support for digitisation projects in the regions.

Considerable work has been done on technical formats and interoperability. The Ministry recommends using the IIIF protocol (International Image Interoperability Framework) for distributing images and audiovisual content. Dublin Core, EAD, and OAI-PMH standards facilitate metadata exchange between institutions. The Europeana database aggregates digitised collections at the European level. These technical infrastructures constitute an essential foundation.

However, these efforts remain largely oriented towards conservation and scientific documentation. Digitisation is conceived as an extension of the museum’s traditional missions: inventorying, describing, preserving. The databases are designed for professionals and researchers. The Joconde interface, despite its qualities, remains that of a documentary catalogue, not a space for exploration and appropriation by the general public.

Yet the central challenge is not merely to digitise heritage: it is to enable its appropriation by citizens. Digitising without thinking about uses means creating dead archives. The decisive question is: how will visitors, residents, and heritage communities be able to take hold of this digitised heritage to make something of their own from it?

Anticipating the uses of 2045: the challenge of the unpredictable

To measure the scale of transformations to come, we need only look back. In 2005, YouTube did not yet exist. The iPhone would not be launched until 2007. There were no smartphones, no apps, no GPS in pockets. Social networks were in their infancy. Most citizens had never published content on the internet. Cultural practices took place almost exclusively in physical space: people went to the cinema, bought CDs, watched television at broadcast times.

Twenty years later, at the beginning of 2026, the landscape is unrecognisable. The majority of cultural practices now pass through the interface of mobile phones and internet access. Every person can be a creator and distribute their own content—texts, photos, videos, audio creations—from the device they carry in their pocket. Streaming platforms have transformed access to music and audiovisual content. Generative artificial intelligences are beginning to disrupt cultural creation and mediation.

This change is not merely technical: it is anthropological. The relationship to time, space, information, and creation has been turned upside down. Citizens are no longer merely consumers of culture: they are potentially producers, commentators, curators, distributors. This transformation of positions and roles lies at the heart of what the Faro Convention calls “shared responsibility” in matters of heritage.

In twenty years, in 2045, the paradigm will have changed as radically, if not more so, than during the past twenty years. We do not know the exact nature of these changes. Perhaps interfaces will be immersive, perhaps artificial intelligences will be daily companions for cultural discovery, perhaps forms of creation and sharing that we cannot imagine will have emerged. What we do know is that practices will be essentially different from those of today.

It is precisely because we do not know these future uses that we must act now. Making heritage accessible to future uses means digitising it in open and sustainable formats, documenting metadata in a rich and interoperable way, enabling reuse and appropriation. If we do not do this today, heritage will be absent from the cultural practices of citizens in 2045. We will have cut future generations off from their links to common heritage.

The long tail of heritage: every work can find its audience

Unlike limited physical “shelves,” digital platforms allow for aggregating an unlimited quantity of content and offer qualified visibility without time limits. Chris Anderson, in The Long Tail (2007), shows how recommendation systems allow “minor” works to find their audience over the long term. Applied to heritage, this principle means that every object, even one not in the main exhibition path, can “emerge” through its thematic links with others and through visitors’ explorations.

A work kept in storage, but accessible digitally, continues to live and can generate interest decades after its acquisition. This expanded accessibility directly responds to Article 12 of the Faro Convention, which calls for “facilitating access to cultural heritage, particularly for young people and disadvantaged persons.” Digital technology makes it possible to reach audiences who will never cross the threshold of the physical museum—not through disinterest, but through geographical distance, economic constraints, or simply through ignorance of what might interest them.

Contrary to popular belief, digital is not only about the instantaneous. On platforms, half of the activity concerns old content that continues its life for years. An Arte documentary on fasting broadcast in 2011 exploded on social networks eight years later, generating a sequel. This surprising temporal perspective must structure heritage thinking: content created today will constitute a living heritage that will continue to generate interest and unforeseen uses for decades.

Digital sovereignty: the condition for heritage autonomy

This digital accessibility raises a central question: that of sovereignty and institutional responsibility. As Dominique Cardon shows in Digital Culture (2019), “if we make the digital, it also makes us. That is why it is essential that we forge a digital culture for ourselves.” Heritage institutions cannot simply delegate their digital presence to commercial platforms. They must develop their own infrastructures to guarantee the sustainability and openness of their collections.

This requirement aligns with Article 11 of the Faro Convention, which calls for “developing legal frameworks enabling public authorities and other stakeholders to exercise shared responsibility for cultural heritage.” Digital sovereignty is not merely a technical issue: it is the very condition for exercising cultural rights in digital space.

When an institution chooses to store its data on Google Drive, Microsoft 365, or Vimeo, it abdicates part of its sovereignty. The data is no longer the property of the institution; its storage and management are devolved to private actors subject to foreign jurisdictions. As Microsoft confirmed during the summer of 2025, these companies will hand over their users’ data to US authorities if requested, even if that data is stored in France. This is simply the application of the US Cloud Act of 2018.

The fire at a government data centre in South Korea in September 2025 brutally recalls this fragility. 750,000 civil servants lost all their files. Data deemed too voluminous had not been duplicated. This disaster echoes the fire at an OVH building in Strasbourg in 2021, which irretrievably took offline more than 400,000 websites.

Digital data possesses this paradoxical characteristic of being infinitely reproducible while remaining infinitely fragile. A perfect copy can be created in a fraction of a second. Yet without preventive duplication, its disappearance is absolutely irremediable. Sovereignty without taking responsibility becomes a greater vulnerability than dependence.

Beyond collections: patrimonialising lived experiences

The challenge of heritage digitisation extends far beyond museums. It concerns all structures that have heritage to constitute and transmit: archives, libraries, cultural centres, theatres, performance venues, associations, local authorities. Wherever cultural experiences take place, the question of their trace and their transmission arises.

For patrimonialising collections of objects is not enough. What constitutes heritage also includes stories, photographs, testimonies, creative processes, experiences lived by people in places. A cultural action carried out in a neighbourhood, an artistic practice workshop with residents, a mediation that transformed the perspective of a school group: all of this constitutes precious intangible heritage that disappears if not documented.

The Faro Convention, by recognising everyone’s right to “contribute to the enrichment of cultural heritage,” opens the way to this expanded patrimonialisation. It is no longer simply a matter of preserving what experts have designated as heritage, but of documenting lived experiences, appropriations, and reinterpretations that citizens make of heritage.

This ambition has a fundamental political dimension. Traditional history is the history of the powerful: it preserves traces of kings, battles, great men. Patrimonialising experiences lived by ordinary citizens means constituting a democratic history. It means enabling the history of the future to no longer be solely that of the dominant, but also that of residents, popular practices, everyday cultures.

Shared responsibility: foundation of a new governance

The Faro Convention introduces an essential concept for thinking about the future of heritage: “shared responsibility.” Its Article 1 affirms that “aspects of cultural heritage are subject to shared responsibility between citizens and public authorities.” This vision goes beyond the traditional opposition between experts and publics to outline a governance where heritage communities become active partners.

In digital space, this shared responsibility takes concrete forms. Visitors can contribute to enriching metadata, propose contextualisations, create thematic trails, document their own relationships to works. The heritage institution ceases to be the sole producer of meaning to become a space where the meanings of heritage are collectively negotiated.

This transformation requires rethinking the articulation between scientific expertise and citizen participation. The curator does not disappear: their role evolves towards that of facilitator, guarantor of scientific quality while welcoming the diversity of perspectives. As Michel de Certeau emphasised in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), culture is constructed through the appropriations and diversions that users make of the objects offered to them.

Digital technology amplifies this capacity for appropriation. It makes it possible to document and valorise uses, to create spaces for dialogue between the different heritage communities that form around the same object. A painting can simultaneously interest art historians, restorers, descendants of the families depicted, and residents of the territory where it was painted. Digital heritage can accommodate these different perspectives without hierarchising them a priori.

Preparing today for the heritage of tomorrow

What can heritage institutions concretely do to prepare for this transformation? Several projects are essential:

1. First, continue and amplify the digitisation of collections, favouring open formats and interoperability standards. The adoption of the IIIF protocol, recommended by the Ministry of Culture, must become widespread. Metadata must be rich enough to allow future uses that we cannot yet imagine.
2. Next, develop sovereign digital infrastructures. This does not mean doing everything alone: pooling between institutions, partnerships with European digital actors, collectively managed open-source solutions are all possible paths. The essential thing is to control one’s data, to be able to migrate it, to guarantee its sustainability.
3. Then, broaden the notion of heritage to be digitised. Beyond collections of objects, document lived experiences, cultural actions, participants’ testimonies. Create the conditions for citizens themselves to contribute to this documentation. Conceive of digital heritage as a space for collective writing of history.
4. Finally, train teams in this new digital culture. Technical skills are necessary but not sufficient: it is also necessary to develop an understanding of the economic, legal, and social issues of digital technology. As Dominique Cardon reminded us, understanding how digital technology shapes us is the condition for shaping it in turn.

Writing a democratic history

Learning to master digital tools, understanding their economic and social logics, developing technical sovereignty—all this requires time and resources. But it is at this price that heritage institutions will be able to continue to fulfil their role in the decades to come: not as frozen temples, but as living places where the meanings of our common heritage are negotiated and shared.

The Faro Convention reminds us that cultural heritage is “a resource for human development, the enhancement of cultural diversity, and the promotion of intercultural dialogue.” Museums, archives, libraries, and all institutions that preserve and transmit heritage are the custodians of this resource. Their responsibility is to make it accessible to the greatest number, in forms that respect everyone’s cultural rights.

The stakes are high. If we do not make heritage accessible to future uses today, it will be absent from the cultural practices of citizens in 2045. An entire generation will grow up cut off from its links to common heritage. The history of the future will be written without the traces of our present.

It is time for heritage institutions to take the full measure of this responsibility—to create a digital world that serves the cultural emancipation of all, and so that the democratic history of citizens can be written alongside the history of the powerful.

Photograph taken by Annaëlle and Abdé (students at the Blois Second Chance School) as part of Benoît Labourdette’s project La machine à voyager dans le futur.