Posted on 11/16/2015 5:55:36 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
The Google Cultural Institute (GCI) and the British Museum have worked together to make it possible people all over the world to enjoy the museum’s many offerings from the comfort of their homes. So far 4,654 objects and artworks have been made available for our perusal. Google’s Street View cameras have trundled through the museum’s vast halls, so you can virtually walk through them from the second basement to the fifth floor, the largest indoor space yet captured on Street View. They’ve even captured the outdoors so you have a stroll around the beautiful museum building itself.
The British Museum has an excellent website with more than 3.5 million objects in its searchable database, 920,000 of them with one of more photographs attached. Many of the pictures are very good, but even the largest of them are modestly sized (the usual caveat regarding my obsession with high resolution photography applies, of course) and there are a significant number that look dated or are in black and white. It’s a wonderful thing, therefore, to have fresh images of thousands of objects in ultra high resolution courtesy of Google’s gigapixel cameras.
For example, the museum’s entry for the Admonitions Scroll, a Chinese painted silk handscroll more than 11 feet long from the 5th to the 8th century that depicts scenes from a 3rd century court poem, has 247 images. If you want to explore the details, you can go through the pictures one by one, but it’s tedious to have to go back and forth and the photo quality is less than satisfying. There are duplicates, old black and white shots and none of the pics I clicked on are more than 750 pixels wide. The scroll looks dingy, the painting dim. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at thehistoryblog.com ...
Cool
The Rosetta Stone is the BEST thing in that museum....as far as I am concerned!! It opened up the ancient world!
Ping
The Rosetta Stone is probably the most historically important artifact in that museum; good point. But historical significance notwithstanding it's sort of dull to look at. The museum is stuffed to the rafters with irreplaceable treasures of the entire world. Simply amazing to walk through it and wonder "what the hell is THAT doing in Britain?"
Indeed!
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