Even More of the British Museum Collection Goes Online
May 11, 2020
Now we can virtually view more works in the British Museum’s extensive collection from the safety of our homes, without even having to register. “British Museum Makes 1.9 Million Images Available for Free,” reports ianVisits. The collection is available under a Creative Commons 4.0 license, so users can download the images for free and use them for non-commercial uses as long as they credit the museum. The database revamp has been launched earlier than planned, both because more people are checking out exhibits online right now and because staff at the shuttered museum have had more free time to work on the project. The post informs us:
“The relaunch also sees 280,000 new object photographs and 85,000 new object records published for the very first time, many of them acquisitions the Museum has made in recent years, including 73 portraits by Damian Hirst, a previously lost watercolor by Rossetti, and a stunning 3,000-year-old Bronze age pendant. … This revamp is the biggest update the Museum’s Collection Online has seen since being first created in 2007. It is now fully responsive, making it accessible on mobile and tablets alongside desktop browsers for the first time. The online collection includes the Museum’s most famous objects such as the Rosetta Stone, the artifacts of Sutton Hoo, the Cyrus Cylinder, the Parthenon Sculptures, and the Benin Bronzes. Object records include physical descriptions, information on materials, display and acquisition history, dimensions, previous owners and curatorial comments. Work is continuing to ensure this information is included as fully as possible on every object in the collection and to add new photographs.”
A nifty new feature is the ability to view some of the objects up close, like he Rapa Nui sculpture Hoa Hakananai’a and the Chinese Admonitions Scroll made over 1600 years ago. Located in London, the venerable British Museum was established by Parliament in 1753. Due largely to the country’s acquisitive nature during its Empire years, its collection is second to none as a resource for exploring human history and cultural diversity.
Can one locate images? Sort of.
Cynthia Murrell, May 11, 2020
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