AI for museums of any size
Upload your documents. Get a Guide that knows your museum - accurate, citing your sources, ready when staff, volunteers, or visitors ask. No collections migration. No IT department required.
It lives in board minutes, exhibition catalogs, donor files, conservation reports, policy manuals, accession files, and a decade of program documentation. When that material is scattered across drives and inboxes - and when the staff who built it move into new roles - it gets hard to reach exactly when you need it.
Ten years of PDFs across SharePoint, Drive, and the shared inbox no one quite owns. The answer is in there. Finding it isn't.
The provenance story for half your collection lives in someone's working memory. When their role changes, so does access to that knowledge.
When a board member, donor, journalist, or researcher asks, the answer takes days instead of minutes - and the answer that goes back isn't always grounded in the right document.
Three steps. Request access, try it on your own documents, then decide.
1
Drag in your PDFs, Word documents, and text files. Guide processes them, builds an index, and remembers what they say. Today the ingest supports PDF, DOCX, TXT, and Markdown - more formats are on the roadmap.
2
Staff, board members, volunteers, researchers - anyone you give access - asks questions in plain English and gets answers grounded in your documents, with citations back to the source.
3
Embed a Guide widget on your museum's website, or share a public link. The same museum-trained assistant, available to your audience around the clock.
These are the situations where institutions tell us institutional AI would matter - ordered from the use case with the strongest economic case to the one most visitors think of first.
Your registrar takes a new role at a peer institution. Your collections manager goes on parental leave. The educator who built your most popular school program moves to a museum across the country. With Guide, the policies they wrote, the program plans they documented, and the institutional decisions they recorded are still searchable - and still answer questions accurately when the new hire asks.
Today: it queues in your curator's inbox, taking forty minutes to research and draft a reply, two weeks after the question arrived. Tomorrow: she searches your archive directly through a public interface, finds the accession file, the exhibition history, and the publication that mentioned it - and tells you what she found. Your curator gets her time back for the inquiries that genuinely need a human.
You need attendance numbers from your 2019 annual report, three of the programs you ran in 2022, the outcomes from your last LSTA grant, and the partnership history with the school district that started somewhere around 2015. All of that lives in documents you have - currently a four-hour archaeology dig. With Guide, it's a single conversation.
Your docent doesn't have to guess, redirect, or promise to email later. Guide is on her phone - she asks, and answers in five seconds with a citation to your records. Volunteers feel competent and confident; tours stay on the actual exhibits.
Your offices are closed for the weekend. The teacher needs to know about exhibits, age-appropriate programs, accessibility, and parking. The Guide widget on your website answers in their language, around the clock. The questions your communications team would have triaged Monday morning are answered before they reach your inbox.
Guide doesn't invent answers. Every reply cites the document it came from. And on top of your own material, Guide knows the published standards your field already runs on - so when a question touches policy or method, the answer is informed by them.
Every answer cites the page in the document it came from. Staff can verify; visitors can trust.
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act - the law, the regulations, and the consultation guidance.
Categories for the Description of Works of Art - the cataloguing vocabulary that travels across institutions.
Conservation guidance, federal preservation standards, and Getty vocabularies - built in, not something you have to teach Guide yourself.
A generic chatbot doesn't know what an accession number is, what a deed of gift looks like, or what NAGPRA Section 3 requires. Guide does, and treats your documents accordingly.
A free tier to begin. Upgrade as you grow.
Free
$0
One person, trying it out
Solo
$29 / mo
A single staff member
Core
$79 / mo
A small museum team
Professional
$299 / mo
Mid-size museums with public-facing use
Team
$799 / mo
Larger institutions, higher traffic
New workspaces start free - no credit card required. Upgrade anytime.
See full pricingThis standalone product is for museums that want Guide on its own - without the rest of the platform. If you run Madrona Collections, Media, or Content, Guide comes with it, and has access to your collection records, not just your documents.
See the full platform GuideWe're onboarding early-access institutions now. Tell us about yours and we'll set you up - upload a handful of documents, ask a question, see if it answers the way you'd hope.
A self-serve, monthly subscription - currently in early access.