The Global Exhibition Hall

 

Conserving valuable artworks, and artifacts is only part of a museum's mission. It also must share its collections with the public. Yet museums can display only so many objects at once—and only so many people can visit them. With new technologies enabling projects that used to be infeasible, museums are creating high-quality digital images of sprawling collections and making them accessible to anyone online.

“We can now digitize more collections in a shorter amount of time for less money,” says Günter Waibel, director, digitization program office, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA.

The blending of the digital sphere with the marble-and-mortar environs of traditional museums is also a matter of survival. As a paper presented at the 2015 Museums and the Web conference noted, “the expectations in terms of audience are clear: if information is not available online, then it simply does not exist.”

The world's largest museum system is taking that to heart. Each year, the Smithsonian's 19 museums welcome about 30 million visitors. But they're missing …

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