Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Making Collections Available

I like learning about ways that Museums make their collections available to the public. Some museums only allow researchers (and members of the general public) access to the collection by making appointments with the Curator. That's fine. That's good. We should allow people access to the collection, especially because we are (at least according to our collections policy) holding the collection in the public's trust.

But, some museums go beyond this making available their entire collections database online. I love this. People can browse through the museum's collection-- they can see all those things that we can't fit on exhibit.

Today, I was reading one of my normal "museum" blogs and I ran across something that I hadn't seen before. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston makes images of their artwork available for use as cell phone wallpapers. Brilliant!

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