Last November, the British Museum unveiled the initial results of its partnership with Google.
The Google Cultural Institute initiative aims to make the world’s cultural heritage more readily available online. Google provides its Street View technology to museums to enable virtual tours, and also hosts digitised images of an increasing range of collectionsonline.
These services are provided for free and there is currently around 50 museums in the UK partnering with the institute, and more than 1,000 worldwide.
The British Museum is now the largest indoor space to have been mapped using Street View. Around 5,000 of its objects can be viewed on the Google Arts and Culture website and have been embedded into the virtual tour of the museum.
The third element of the partnership is the experimental Museum of the World microsite, which allows people to explore geographic and thematic links between a selection of objects.
The British Museum already had an extensive digital collection online, but Chris Michaels, the museum’s head of digital and publishing, says that the projects offer new and different ways of navigating the collection.
“The online collections search application depends on knowing what you’re looking for. These mechanisms are about the general audience exploring and discovering for themselves,” he explains.
“Google have access to an audience that we don’t have,” he adds. “And their technology also has a capability for high-definition zooming and display that we don’t have, so it gives people the opportunity to really explore images in much greater detail.”
As well as its Street View mapping work, Google took an ultra-high definition photo of the Admonitions Scroll, an important classical Chinese painting.
“It can’t be physically displayed in the museum for more than eight weeks a year because of conservation requirements, so it’s a chance to make it permanently available,” says Michaels.
An interactive exhibit in the physical museum, allowing visitors to explore the image, has also been created.
Museums working with Google are also able to create online exhibitions, which can be viewed on Google’s site or embedded on their own websites, and promoted on social media channels.
The British Museum releases a new online exhibition about every six weeks. An exhibition on Celtic Life in Iron Age Britain, related to the museum’s blockbuster Celts show, displays objects held by 14 other UK institutions, as well as those in the British Museum’s collection.
“These are really good opportunities for us to work in new and experimental ways with partners on storytelling,” says Michaels.
The Royal College of Music (RCM) Museum is another institution working with Google. Richard Martin, the museum’s digitisation officer, says that the partnership enables people to view the collection during an extensive redevelopment project that means the museum will be closed until 2019.
“We wanted to ensure that materials are available to the public, students and researchers while we are closed,” says Martin. “Beyond that, when we reopen as a physical museum, we will also have digital interactive [tools] for people to explore objects that may not be on display physically.”
Exploiting the multimedia potential of online exhibitions is also high on the agenda.
“We’ve got quite an important collection of musical instruments, which have a great deal of potential for interactivity through audio and video,” says Martin. “We really want to make sure that is explored.”
Making the museum’s collection available on Google Arts and Culture also enables it to be seen as part of a bigger cultural picture. “As a small museum within a specialist higher education institution, it allows us to present our collection in the same sphere as other larger institutions,” he adds.
Some sound recordings have already been incorporated into the museum’s online exhibitions. And more recordings will be made of instruments in its own collection and the collections of other UK institutions as part of the project MINIM-UK (Musical Instrument Interface for Museums and collections).
The RCM Museum is leading this project in partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, Edinburgh University and London’s Horniman Museum. The Google Cultural Institute is acting as an external adviser.
MINIM-UK, expected to be complete by 2017, aims to create digital records for more than 20,000 instruments held in more than 100 collections across the UK. The records will be available on aggregator sites, with a selection also accessible on the Google Arts and Culture website.
Museums have worked with other technology companies on digital collection projects. Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums (Twam), partnered with Microsoft Research, as well as the University of Newcastle, on developing its Collections Dive interface, which uses infinite scrolling. [Link to public engagement feature].
While Twam managed the project there was still ample opportunity for the museum’s digital team to witness the working practices of Microsoft Research, which has proven to be invaluable.
“They employed Agile techniques such as design-led research, where they quickly prototype a project and use it within public workshops to provoke a response. They then take that research to improve the system through a cycle of iterations,” says John Coburn, the digital programmes manager at Twam. He says that the working practices of Microsoft Research were instructive.
“That’s not the way that the museum service generally works, but it’s something that we really learned from, and it was really beneficial to see that approach in action,” he adds.
The Google Cultural Institute initiative aims to make the world’s cultural heritage more readily available online. Google provides its Street View technology to museums to enable virtual tours, and also hosts digitised images of an increasing range of collectionsonline.
These services are provided for free and there is currently around 50 museums in the UK partnering with the institute, and more than 1,000 worldwide.
The British Museum is now the largest indoor space to have been mapped using Street View. Around 5,000 of its objects can be viewed on the Google Arts and Culture website and have been embedded into the virtual tour of the museum.
The third element of the partnership is the experimental Museum of the World microsite, which allows people to explore geographic and thematic links between a selection of objects.
The British Museum already had an extensive digital collection online, but Chris Michaels, the museum’s head of digital and publishing, says that the projects offer new and different ways of navigating the collection.
“The online collections search application depends on knowing what you’re looking for. These mechanisms are about the general audience exploring and discovering for themselves,” he explains.
“Google have access to an audience that we don’t have,” he adds. “And their technology also has a capability for high-definition zooming and display that we don’t have, so it gives people the opportunity to really explore images in much greater detail.”
As well as its Street View mapping work, Google took an ultra-high definition photo of the Admonitions Scroll, an important classical Chinese painting.
“It can’t be physically displayed in the museum for more than eight weeks a year because of conservation requirements, so it’s a chance to make it permanently available,” says Michaels.
An interactive exhibit in the physical museum, allowing visitors to explore the image, has also been created.
Museums working with Google are also able to create online exhibitions, which can be viewed on Google’s site or embedded on their own websites, and promoted on social media channels.
The British Museum releases a new online exhibition about every six weeks. An exhibition on Celtic Life in Iron Age Britain, related to the museum’s blockbuster Celts show, displays objects held by 14 other UK institutions, as well as those in the British Museum’s collection.
“These are really good opportunities for us to work in new and experimental ways with partners on storytelling,” says Michaels.
The Royal College of Music (RCM) Museum is another institution working with Google. Richard Martin, the museum’s digitisation officer, says that the partnership enables people to view the collection during an extensive redevelopment project that means the museum will be closed until 2019.
“We wanted to ensure that materials are available to the public, students and researchers while we are closed,” says Martin. “Beyond that, when we reopen as a physical museum, we will also have digital interactive [tools] for people to explore objects that may not be on display physically.”
Exploiting the multimedia potential of online exhibitions is also high on the agenda.
“We’ve got quite an important collection of musical instruments, which have a great deal of potential for interactivity through audio and video,” says Martin. “We really want to make sure that is explored.”
Making the museum’s collection available on Google Arts and Culture also enables it to be seen as part of a bigger cultural picture. “As a small museum within a specialist higher education institution, it allows us to present our collection in the same sphere as other larger institutions,” he adds.
Some sound recordings have already been incorporated into the museum’s online exhibitions. And more recordings will be made of instruments in its own collection and the collections of other UK institutions as part of the project MINIM-UK (Musical Instrument Interface for Museums and collections).
The RCM Museum is leading this project in partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, Edinburgh University and London’s Horniman Museum. The Google Cultural Institute is acting as an external adviser.
MINIM-UK, expected to be complete by 2017, aims to create digital records for more than 20,000 instruments held in more than 100 collections across the UK. The records will be available on aggregator sites, with a selection also accessible on the Google Arts and Culture website.
Museums have worked with other technology companies on digital collection projects. Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums (Twam), partnered with Microsoft Research, as well as the University of Newcastle, on developing its Collections Dive interface, which uses infinite scrolling. [Link to public engagement feature].
While Twam managed the project there was still ample opportunity for the museum’s digital team to witness the working practices of Microsoft Research, which has proven to be invaluable.
“They employed Agile techniques such as design-led research, where they quickly prototype a project and use it within public workshops to provoke a response. They then take that research to improve the system through a cycle of iterations,” says John Coburn, the digital programmes manager at Twam. He says that the working practices of Microsoft Research were instructive.
“That’s not the way that the museum service generally works, but it’s something that we really learned from, and it was really beneficial to see that approach in action,” he adds.