{"id":15429,"date":"2014-03-30T06:00:41","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=15429"},"modified":"2014-03-28T13:42:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-28T17:42:18","slug":"online-museum-collections-overwhelming-useful-and-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2014\/03\/30\/online-museum-collections-overwhelming-useful-and-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Online museum collections: overwhelming, useful and fun"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You would expect to see a dinosaur skeleton or two at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, but there’s a lot more to it. For example–a public online database of 710,000 records of plants, animals, fossils, and minerals. Photo: Robert Linsdell<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

Technology sure can be a double-edged sword. Besides examples of excess in surveillance – or equally sinister pursuits – \u00a0in other wonderful ways knowledge is being set free, for all to see and use.<\/p>\n

Take things like free e-books from Project Gutenberg<\/a>. (It’s not new, but maybe more people should know about it.)<\/p>\n

Along similar lines, many museums are digitizing their records and collections, making such material available to researchers or interested persons around the world. Examples include the British Museum<\/a>: “There are currently 2,126,783 records available, which represent more than 3,500,000 objects. 823,748 records have one or more images.”<\/p>\n

That’s pretty overwhelming, so try narrowing it down to something manageable, like artifacts recovered from the ruins of Pompeii<\/a>. From which one can see singe items, like this wall painting of a bird pecking at cherries<\/a>, or a portrait of a man and woman<\/a> to make ancient times feel like people who once lived real lives.<\/p>\n

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (regular adult admission $25) has 258,856 searchable items<\/a> one may view for free<\/em> online, many of which are not on display, such as this queen from a deck of playing cards, circa 1470-80<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Want more? Try the Smithsonian<\/a> for everything Americana. (Drill down for local content, such as an 1866 painting\u00a0“Whiteface Mountain from Lake Placid” by Sanford Robinson Gifford<\/a>, or\u00a0“Group skijoring behind 1920’s automobile<\/a>“.)<\/p>\n

Well, you get the point. It’s not that everything is, will be (or should be) available online. But more and more stuff is, from soup to nuts.<\/p>\n

This week the Canadian Museum of Nature announced their own contribution to the world of online access. From this recent\u00a0press release<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Ottawa, March 26, 2014<\/strong>\u2014The Canadian Museum of Nature, Canada’s national museum of natural history, has launched a free scientific database featuring open access to more than 710,000 records of plants, animals, fossils, and minerals that are part of the museum’s national collections. The searchable online resource is accessible through the museum’s web site at\u00a0nature.ca\/collections-online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The digitized records represent about one-quarter (or 22%) of the museum’s estimated 3.2 million “cataloguable units” of biological and geological material. Overall, the museum estimates it manages more than 10.5 million individual specimens that have been acquired over more than 150 years. The collections,\u00a0which cover Canada and other parts of the world<\/a>, are stored and curated at the museum’s\u00a0Natural Heritage Campus<\/a>\u00a0in Gatineau, Quebec.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n