Groninger Museum launches AI-powered digital collection platform with Prepr

The Groninger Museum has launched Groninger Museum Collection, an innovative digital platform that makes its art collection accessible to a wider audience. The platform allows visitors to explore tens of thousands of artworks online and discover unexpected connections between objects through artificial intelligence.

Developed together with digital agency theFactor.e, the platform combines advanced search, AI-powered tagging, and an intuitive browsing experience to help people engage with art in a more personal way. Prepr powers the content layer behind the platform, enabling the museum to structure and deliver its collection data in a flexible and scalable way.

The platform connects several technologies to make the collection searchable and engaging:

• Axiell integration – artwork data and images are extracted from the museum’s archive system
• Prepr – structures and delivers the content powering the digital collection experience
• Azure Vision – analyzes artwork images to detect visual characteristics
• OpenAI tagging – generates descriptive tags that connect artworks through themes and concepts
• Content filtering – ensures the collection remains appropriate for all audiences

Together, these technologies make it possible to explore a collection of tens of thousands of artworks in an intuitive way.

Together with theFactor.e, the Groninger Museum developed a digital collection platform that allows users to explore artworks intuitively and interactively.

The platform is powered by Prepr, which manages the content and structures the information behind the collection experience. With its headless architecture, Prepr enables the museum to organize artworks, metadata, and editorial content in a flexible way and deliver it seamlessly to the digital platform.

Visitors can browse through artworks, discover related objects through AI-generated tags and explore the collection through themes and interests. The platform also allows visitors to contribute comments and perspectives, creating a more participatory art experience.

During the discovery phase, theFactor.e explored how different audiences relate to museums and art.

Rather than focusing only on traditional museum visitors, the team looked at how people with different levels of interest in art engage with cultural institutions. The research showed that art becomes much more engaging when it connects to people’s personal interests and curiosity.

To support this type of exploration, the platform uses artificial intelligence to enrich the collection data.

Artworks are automatically tagged using everyday language connected to themes and interests, making them easier to search and explore. AI also analyzes images and generates tags that help create unexpected connections between artworks.

This allows visitors to discover objects not only through traditional museum categories, but also through visual similarities and shared themes. Visitors can also leave comments and perspectives on artworks, adding new interpretations and encouraging dialogue around the collection.

All of this comes together in the digital collection platform.

Like many museums, the Groninger Museum holds a large part of its collection in storage. With more than 35,000 artworks in its depot, only a small portion of the collection is visible to visitors at any given time.

The museum wanted to make this hidden collection accessible online and reach people who might not normally visit a museum.

The ambition was not simply to digitize the archive, but to create a digital experience that allows people to discover art based on their own interests.

The digital collection platform opens the museum’s depot to a much broader audience. Visitors can now explore artworks online, discover connections between objects, and engage with art through their own interests.

By combining AI technology with a flexible content platform, the Groninger Museum created a new way to interact with its collection, one that makes art more accessible, discoverable, and relevant for a diverse audience.