A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalized, interactive, and rich content. Virtual museums can act as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or act independently while maintaining the authoritative status as bestowed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in its definition of a museum. In tandem with the ICOM mission of physical museums, virtual museums provide public access to the knowledge systems embedded in their collections, systematically and coherently organize their display, and preserve their collections for the long term.
As with traditional museums, virtual museums can be designed around specific topics (such as art or natural history), or can consist of online exhibitions created from primary or secondary resources (as, for example, in a science museum). Moreover, a virtual museum can refer to the mobile or online offerings of traditional museums (e.g., displaying digital representations of its collections or exhibits); or can be born digital content such as, 3D environments, net art, virtual reality and digital art. Often discussed in conjunction with other cultural institutions, museums, by definition, are essentially separate from their sister institutions, such as libraries or archives. Virtual museums are usually, but not exclusively, delivered electronically when they are denoted as online museums, hypermuseums, digital museums, cybermuseums, or web museums.
Offline pioneers (CD-ROM and digital media before 2000) The following museums were created with digital technology before the web gained any form of popularity or mass usability. CD-ROM and postal mail distribution made these museums available worldwide, before web browsers, fast connections, and ubiquitous web usage. The Canadian new media artist collective named "La société de conservation du présent", created the world's first Virtual museum accessible from 1989 to 1993 by modem via Bell Canada's Alex (videotex service) system. Critical of rising neo-liberalism and the standardization of museum and art practices, "the Musée Standard proposes to consider the circulation of information, the inscription of the archive in public space and its energization through a process of anarchy as an activity intimately linked to the movements of life and art." The Australian new media artist Jeffrey Shaw created a Virtual Museum in 1991. As presented in 1992 at Ars Electronica, it also incorporated pioneering AR features. The Virtual Museum, Apple Computer. Released as a CD-ROM in 1992, and distributed free worldwide to 1000 schools, universities, and museums, The Virtual Museum was an interactive, electronic museum where users moved from room to room, and selected any exhibit in a room for more detailed examination. The exhibits in the museum were educational, encompassing topics such as medicine, plant growth, the environment, and space. To facilitate interaction with the museum, a new method for navigating through a prerendered 3D space and interacting with objects in that space was developed, called 'virtual navigation'. Virtual navigation employed real-time video decompression for the display of, and interaction with, high-quality computer animation. In addition, a representation for 3D objects in animated sequences was used, which permitted pixel-accurate, frame-accurate object picking, so that a viewer was able to select any 3D object to trigger movement within the 3D space, to examine an exhibit in animated form, or to play a digital movie or soundtrack. The use of precomputed video permitted 3D navigation in a realistic-looking space, without requiring special-purpose graphics hardware. This was designed as a project to showcase new techniques in computer graphics at the time, particularly to push the envelope of what QuickTime was capable of, as it was still in beta. This project was the grandfather of QuickTime VR, which made sense given Eric Chen's role in the project. The Virtual Museum was a product of Apple Computer, Inc.'s 3D graphics group and was created by Gavin Miller, Eric Hoffert, Shenchang Eric Chen, Elizabeth Patterson, Dean Blackketter, Steve Rubin, Sally Applin, Derrick Yim and Jim Hanan under the leadership of Frank Crow. Apple's Virtual Museum was featured at SIGGRAPH 1992, CHI 1992, MacWorld, Tokyo 1992, Demo ’92, Palm Springs, CA; and Supercomm, Atlanta, GA in 1993. Guggenheim Virtual Museum. In 1999, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation released an experimental interactive virtual museum, conceived by the American design office Asymptote Architecture and based on VRML technology, to provide a virtual hub for the various venues of the foundation around the world, as well as to host exhibitions of cyberart.
Online pioneers (web-based sites established before 2000) The following online museums were pioneers. In the period, web pages were simpler, bandwidth was slower, the concepts of the online museum were still developing, and there were limited multimedia technologies available within web browsers. Some online museums began in non-website electronic forms, and not all were established by existing physical museums. Many online museums have become significant sources of scholarly information, including extensive citations within Wikipedia.
ibiblio – founded 1992. An online exhibition with the backing of the Library of Congress, ibiblio hosted EXPO Ticket Office with exhibits including a Vatican Exhibit and even a virtual "restaurant" and "post office". This looks very simplistic now, but was novel in 1991. Museum of Computer Art (MOCA) – founded in 1993. Directed by Don Archer, a non-profit corporation under charter from the Department of Education of New York State (US). MOCA was awarded .museum top-level domain (TLD) status by the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) in 2002 and is now hosted on the Web. WebMuseum, Paris – founded online in 1994 as the WebLouvre, before being required to change its name. A pioneering virtual or online museum, it was created by Nicholas Pioch with images digitized from books and other public-domain sources. It is now hosted by ibiblio.Web Museum, Paris , ibiblio.org. The Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum – online 1994. An early virtual art museum website by the Singaporean artist Lin Hsin Hsin."Virtual Museum Tour – from Reality to Fantasy and Back", p.32, Mishkafayim Art Magazine No.28, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, April 199624 Hours in Cyberspace, p.150, Simon & Schuster, U.S.A., November 1996"Lin Hsin Hsin Art Museum", Sightings!, Art, NetVoice October 1997, p.51Museums Re-Examine Sites, With Frames, and Without, New York Times, U.S.A., 13 March 1997"Museums of the Future Symposium", Co-ordinated and edited by Morten Hertzum, Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, 2 June 1998 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem – first launched in 1995, Hebrew pages 1996. The Museum of the History of Science in Oxford – opened 1683, online 21 August 1995. Later renamed the History of Science Museum, it was the earliest physical museum to inaugurate a programme of virtual exhibitions with detailed collections-based content and high-resolution images of paintings, books, instruments, and other artworks and artefacts. Located in the oldest surviving purpose-built museum building in the world, it was able to initiate a website relatively early because of the networking facilities and expertise available in the university environment. Web pages were created by staff-member Giles Hudson.Jonathan P. Bowen, Jim Angus, Jim Bennett, Ann Borda, Alpay Beler, Andrew Hodges, and Silvia Filippini-Fantoni, The Development of Science Museum Websites: Case Studies. In Leo Tan Wee Hin and Ramanathan Subramaniam (eds.), E-learning and Virtual Science Centers, Section 3: Case Studies, Chapter XVIII, pages 366–392. Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, US, 2005.Jonathan P. Bowen, Jim Bennett, and James Johnson, Virtual Visits to Virtual Museums . In Jennifer Trant and David Bearman (eds.), Proc. Museums and the Web 1998 , Toronto, Canada, 22–25 April 1998. CD-ROM, Archives & Museum Informatics, 5501 Walnut Street, Suite 203, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15232-2311, US, 1998. The site was mounted on Oxford University's 'Sable' UNIX mainframe, occupied 150MB, and GIFs were used as not all browsers supported JPEGs at the time. Virtual Museum of Computing – founded 1995. This is an eclectic collection of links and online resources concerning the history of computers and computer science. The Natural History Museum, London, first United Kingdom national museum with a web server, online in 1995. The Science Museum in London – founded 1857, online 1995. One of the major science museums in the world was able to establish an early web presence partly due to the proximity of Imperial College, but was also spurred on by the fact that the Natural History Museum, which is next door, had recently established the first dedicated museum web server in the United Kingdom. Virtual Museum of New France – online 1997. Established by the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation. Asia Society Virtual Gallery – online 1998. Created for the exhibition "More Than Meets the Eye". The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County – founded 1910, online 1998. The museum is the largest natural and historical museum in the Western United States and an active research center. WebExhibits – founded 1999, online 1999. WebExhibits is an interactive, web-based museum that encourages visitors to think about and explore scientific and cultural phenomena in new ways.Michael Douma (2000). Lessons learned from WebExhibits.org: Practical suggestions for good design . In: Museums and the Web 2000 . Proceedings. Ed. by David Bearman & Jennifer Trant. Exhibits include "Investigating Bellini's Feast of the Gods," "Causes of Color," "Color Vision & Art," Pigments through the Ages," "Butter," "Van Gogh's Letters," "Poetry through the Ages," "Calendars through the Ages," and "Daylight Saving Time." Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci – founded 1954, online 1996. The National Museum of Science and Technology, online since 1996, launched in 1999 an online 3D virtual cooperative environment, the first of its kind in the museum world. Ljubljana: Open-Air Museum – founded 1993, online 1996. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, was presented as a huge museum where streets were the exhibitions of the architecture and building interiors were museum rooms. The method of the presentation was interactive maps and interactive virtual reality panoramas. The aim of the project was to create "3D like" virtual visit of the museum and replacing and documenting the "reality" exhibition after it was discontinued in its original "reality form". After 1996, the project was extended to "Virtual museums of Slovenia", covering all museums in the country, totalling over 106 museum exhibitions. Further development of the "Virtual museum" developed to project City View documenting natural and cultural heritage of the country with over 10,000 locations added by 2006. The Thylacine Museum – online 1999. The Thylacine Museum is an online scientific and educational resource aimed at promoting a greater awareness and understanding of the biology, behaviour, and history of the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus).
Other online museums