Now, you can visit the British Museum, even if you live across the pond.
On the morning of Nov. 12, the British Museum announced that it has teamed up with the Google Cultural Institute to create a digital tour of the museum's 4,500 artworks and historical artifacts on display, all of which are now available to view online.
The tour of the museum's permanent galleries are accessible through Google's Street View platform, with walk-throughs of exhibition highlights like Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs, which elucidates the connections between Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the region after the fall of the Pharaohs, and the museum's vast collection of Celtic objects from the Roman occupation of England and Britain's Iron Age.
"The world today has changed; the way we access information has been revolutionized by digital technology," said Neil MacGregor, the museum's director, in a statement released on the gallery's blog. "We live in a world where sharing knowledge has become easier, we can do extraordinary things with technology which enables us to give the Enlightenment ideal on which the Museum was founded a new reality."
The British Museum's partnership is part of a larger project: the Google Cultural Institute's Museums of the World, an interactive online collection that boasts over 45,000 artifacts from museums found all over the world, from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the Museum of Contemporary Art Bogotá, all of which are aggregated into an interface that resembles a 3D timeline.
"Our partnership with Google allows us to further our own — extraordinary — mission: to be a Museum of and for the World, making the knowledge and culture of the whole of humanity open and available to all," MacGregor concluded.
Via: ARS Technica UK
