Jumping Across the Pond: The British Museum Online Tours

Someday, hopefully soon, I'll be able to visit the U.K.  I'd like to be able to visit Scotland and Ireland and see the English countryside, and of course I want to visit London.  I'm especially interested in seeing the British Museum and I imagine I'll be one of those people who spends a whole day just wandering through the galleries.  Until that day, though, I can satisfy my curiosity with the British Museum Online Tours.

I haven't seen another virtual museum or virtual collection from a physical museum that bills itself as a tour.  Usually these entities like to refer to their online portions as exhibits, probably because they're hoping a web-based platform can provide an interactive experience that at least partially simulates a real, self-guided visit.  That's not what the British Museum aims to do here - there are no 3D renderings, animations or audio accompaniments.  The Online Tours are simply collections of objects with accompanying text.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, because the wealth of images and information available online is astounding.  You can view hundreds of objects from civilizations across the globe, and also nose through the images from several exhibits that deal with the modern world.  The images are high quality and many include notes about whether they can be used in the public domain.  I imagine that these online tours are quite like what you might encounter if you took a docent's tour at the British Museum:  a lot of looking and listening, with a heaping dose of expert opinion.

But if you're looking for something extra - a chance to explore the objects on your own terms or question the curatorial viewpoint - you're not going to find that here.  There is much more that the British Museum could do with their online collections that they have chosen not to pursue.  Multi-angle viewing would be nice, as would a chance to ask questions or add comments.  Perhaps a more unified online presence would allow visitors to connect these cultures and their objects to understand our present-day interdependencies and understand just how the British Museum ended up holding onto a headdress from the Marquesas Islands.

Still, the fact that these objects are even available for me to view at home, 3,500 miles from London, is amazing.  Even if I never do get a chance to visit the U.K., I can see at least some of their collections in vivid detail.  For that I'm grateful, as are many others who only want to know what the curator thinks.  I just wonder what else the British Museum could do with their online tours if they cared to try.



The British Museum Online Tours
Website:  www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours.aspx