The proliferation of improved scanning technologies and digital record-keeping systems led to mass-digitisation efforts and the launch of numerous online archives and collections (Terras <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" style="font-size:10pt">, 2011</hi>). Cultural heritage and research institutions have had to adapt their practices to account for shifts in what contemporary cultural stewardship and the study of cultural memory entails (Parry, 2010). Collections of images and texts need to be fully accessible to fulfil institutional missions (Kapsalis, 2016; Maher and Tallon, 2018). In the vast majority of cases, access implies viewing siloed resources, such as scanned text pages or photographs of physical objects and sometimes 3D renderings, alongside minimal descriptive metadata. But digital representations of cultural assets in the form of 3D models within disciplines such as architecture, art, archaeology, and 3D reconstruction are particularly heterogeneous in formats and structure, ergo standardized access and visualisation tools fail to meet new research objectives and institutional requirements. Especially as the result of state-of-the-art digitisation efforts, 3D datasets challenge renderers in terms of geometric complexity, memory and bandwidth requirements (Koller et al., 2009). What is more, cultural memory preservation is not guaranteed through digitisation activities alone, but instead requires the active participation of diverse audiences who can search, access and enrich datasets through annotation and critical interpretation.