The British Museum Has Put 300,000 Images of Its Most Famous Artworks Online So You Can Play Around With Them

With much of world on lockdown, now’s a good time to get around
to tasks you’ve long putting off. For London’s British Museum, that
includes adding objects and images to its online collections
database. To date, it has digitized nearly 4.5 million objects, or
about half of its encyclopedic collection.

The new update includes close to 300,000 new photographs, for a
total of 1.9 million images, all of which are free to download and
use for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons
license. And for the first time, the online catalogue, launched in
2007, is accessible on mobile phones and tablets.

The museum has also added high-resolution photographs of objects
like the famed Rosetta Stone that are
invisible to the human eye, even if you were to be at the
museum.

“We are delighted to be able to unveil this major revamp early,
and hope that these important objects can provide inspiration,
reflection, or even just quiet moments of distraction during this
difficult time,” Hartwig Fischer, director of the museum,
said in a statement.

New additions to the digital collection include the Easter
Island sculpture Hoa Hakananai’a, a
1,600-year-old Chinese Admonitions
Scroll, and painter Dante Gabriel
Rossetti’s The Death of Breuze Sans
Pitié, which was acquired in
September.

The museum is also touting new online catalogue entries for
73 Damien Hirst drawings
(collectively titled “Portraits of Frank, The Wolseley Drawings”),
in which the artist sketched his business manager on placemats
during their regular breakfast meetings between 2004 and 2010.
Unfortunately, however, no images of the works are available.

Nevertheless, the additions to the online catalogue are sure to
boost the British Museum’s online traffic, which is already up 120
percent compared to this time last year, according to the
museum.

However, the process has not been
without its gaffes, reports the BBC. In cataloguing its holdings of
Turkish postcards, the museum mistook a copyright notice—”Her Hakki
Mahfuzdur,” which means “all rights reserved”—for the name of a
stationary company. The institution claimed the postcards were from
“Turkey’s largest producer of postcards” until an eagle-eyed
Turkish diplomat identified the error on Twitter.

“Whoops!” the British Museum replied.
“Thanks for pointing this out.”

See more images from the digital collection below.

The post The British Museum Has Put 300,000 Images of Its
Most Famous Artworks Online So You Can Play Around With Them
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