British Museum opens all hours on Google

In my opinion, the most interesting thing announced this morning was the "Museum of the World" microsite-a Chrome experiment that visualises the connection between cultures and historical objects.

Neil MacGregor, the soon-to-depart director of the British Museum, called it "a very important day in the history of the British Museum" because it made possible the 18th-century dream of the museum being a collection of the world, for the world.

The British Museum's partnership is part of a larger project: the Museums of the World, an interactive online collection that boasts over 45,000 artifacts from museums found all over the world, from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to the Museum of Contemporary Art Bogotá, all of which are aggregated into an interface that resembles a 3D timeline.

Virtual visitors can now use Google Street View to "walk" through the British Museum and examine thousands of artefacts online, including the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone. The project means that fragile objects can be viewed all year round, such as the 6th-century Chinese Admonitions Scroll, which can only be seen for a few months a year in its physical form.

The Cyrus Cylinder one of the most famous objects in the British Museum

The Cyrus Cylinder, one of the most famous objects in the British Museum. "This allows people to wander around and explore them".

More than 4,500 items from the museum's collection have been photographed and are available to be seen on a virtual walkthrough of the historic corridors. "It is a huge organisational process for a place as big as this", said Michaels.

"This is a question a lot of people say: 'If you put this all online will people stop visiting museums?' This is totally untrue". "It allows them to come better informed; to look and not just to see", he said. "Through our partnership with Google, we hope to give people new ways to experience and enjoy the museum, new ways to learn, and new ways to teach".

"We're extremely proud to support the British Museum in their mission to be a museum of the world, for the world, through technology", said Amit Sood, the director of the technology firm's Cultural Institute.

The project is paid for by the Google Cultural Institute, a non-profit branch of Google.