Museum Register of Ukraine: From Training to Practical Work with Museums

UNESCO is supporting the Ministry of Culture’s digital infrastructure through the procurement of IT equipment, including servers and laptops, to ensure the successful deployment and ongoing functionality of The Museum Register of Ukraine and information systems of culture and cultural heritage. Despite these advancements, challenges remain, notably in the human and technical capacities of many regional and local museum institutions, which are crucial for their effective participation in and contribution to the registry.

The Museum Register of Ukraine is a digital environment for organising information about museums, collections and museum objects. Its public portal allows users to explore the collections of Ukrainian museums, search for information about individual museums and objects, and view data on stolen and missing museum objects. However, its development also depends on the daily work of museums themselves — digitising documentation and collections, standardising data and cataloguing museum objects.

In August 2025, as part of a UNESCO programme, Lviv Culture Hub hosted the first stage of the project “Advancing Digital Integration: Enhancing Ukraine's State Register of Movable Properties through Museum Digitization” — a series of training sessions on the digitisation of museum collections, implemented by UNESCO in collaboration with the Lviv Culture Hub, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine and HeMo. Around 100 participants worked with electronic databases, digital documentation, 3D tools and approaches to integrating museum data into the Register.

Today, this work continues directly in museums.

As part of the project, the next key stage has begun: the work of mobile expert teams, travelling across the country to provide practical support to museum professionals in digitising and cataloguing their collections. Twelve museums are participating in the project across different regions of Ukraine. Each museum has its own collections, documentation systems and challenges, so the mobile teams provide practical support tailored to the specific context of each institution.

Specialised professional equipment was also procured for this stage. It will help museums digitise more objects from their collections, both for their subsequent inclusion in the Register and, more broadly, to support the rapid digital preservation of this cultural heritage. Museums will also receive digitisation equipment for use throughout the project period.

In this series of publications, we will show how this work is carried out in practice: introducing the museums and their collections, as well as the museum professionals and experts involved in the process.

The project is implemented by UNESCO in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, with organisational support from Lviv Culture Hub, expert support from the HeMo Heritage Monitoring Lab, and financial support from the Government of Flanders.

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