British Museum takes collection online

Ancient history meets cutting edge technology

The British Museum has relaunched its website and made a large part of its collection available to view online.

Around 275,000 of the museum's more than seven million treasures spanning two million years of history have already been uploaded to the new site, and the remaining items will follow over the coming months.

Matthew Cock, head of new media at the British Museum, told vnunet.com that the website was originally built in the mid-1990s and had evolved in a rather piecemeal fashion.

The museum decided to rebuild the site from the ground up to offer visitors a more complete experience of the world famous institution.

The initial batch consists of a large number of prints, drawings and other flat items, as well as information from the curatorial database used by the museum.

Additional images of 3D objects will be uploaded over the course of the next two years.

"The website is not merely a source of information about the museum, but a real insight into the collection and a natural extension of our core purpose," said Mary Pitt, project manager of the internet services department at the British Museum.

The online shop has also been more tightly integrated into the site, and now offers ticketing and membership sales alongside a range of items for sale.

Vialtus Solutions, previously Pipex Business, helped the British Museum to bring the project to fruition.

The site runs on a six-server hosting platform, including two data servers, two web servers, one search engine server and one Internet Security and Acceleration server.

The new site also includes an educational section for kids, with online tours and explanations and an 'ask the experts' feature which enables kids to write in with questions.