MV Blog

Ely is responsible for publishing information about the museum’s collections online – on our own website and on websites run by others. Originally trained as a zoologist, she dropped into the relatively new field of museum informatics several years ago and has never looked back.

We are very excited to announce our participation in the Google Art Project.

At Museum Victoria we aim to give as many people as possible access to our rich and wonderful collections. The internet provides ways to do that far beyond the walls of our public exhibition venues. We provide access to over 72,000 items from our History and Technology Collections through our own Collections Online site. But we also contribute to other projects, which might attract new visitors to our collections; people who come with different interests – or even just different search terms.

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project.
Source: Google / Museum Victoria  

Originally launched in February 2011, the Art Project has now expanded its reach and scope to include 151 institutions across 40 different countries. Museum Victoria has contributed 185 high resolution images into the site, along with detailed descriptive information about each work and biographies of the artists where they are known. The items range from Aboriginal bark paintings, beautiful pencil illustrations, historic photographs depicting early Victorian history, to scientific illustrations and works on display at Melbourne Museum.

The project has been interesting and challenging for museum staff as we have had to think about objects in the collection through the lens of 'art'. Our collections are made for their scientific, cultural or personal significance, so it has been fascinating to look again at the items we hold and to tell their story through art.

To go along with the Art Project website, the Museum has also made thirteen videos about the stories of the objects we've included. These videos are all available in a special playlist at Museum Victoria's YouTube channel. One of the videos, about photographer and naturalist A J Campbell can be seen below, as a taster to explore the others.

We are very excited to join just a handful of other galleries and museums in Australia, including our friends at the NGV, but many others around the world, to showcase extraordinary and beautiful works of art. We hope you will enjoy exploring some our rich treasures in this quite new light.

Links:

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project

Google Art Project playlist on YouTube

The Australian node of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is now live!

BHL is a project started by a consortium of American and English museums and herbaria that wanted to make historical biodiversity texts available online. These important books and journals are scanned, uploaded to the Internet Archive, and made available through the first BHL website. It's especially useful to scientists needing historical information about species, distributions and taxonomy, but it's also a fascinating site for anyone interested in natural history or rare books. Museum Victoria is managing the Australian part of the project in conjunction with the Atlas of Living Australia.

Since late last year, MV Online Developer Michael Mason has been creating a mirror site of the USA/UK original, ready to receive scans of Australian books later this year. At present, the Australian site provides everything the original site provides but with a different interface. "We started with the US model and changed the appearance and some parts of the functionality," says Michael.

Online developer Michael Mason.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The first difference you'll notice is the local influence; the page is adorned with beautiful illustrations of Australian wildlife by Gould and Australian books are featured. Michael has also worked with designer Simon O'Shea to overhaul the way the book viewer looks and works to make it more user-friendly.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia website.
Source: Museum Victoria  

At present, the 34,596,227 pages in the BHL-Australian node come from libraries in US institutions so there is plenty of Australian content yet to be added. First off the rank in this national project are some of the in-house journals that have already been scanned by other museums including those of the Queensland Museum and the Western Australian Museum. Museum Victoria, with new book-scanning equipment, will be leading the development of new scanning projects starting with the complete archive of Memoirs of Museum Victoria containing the first scientific descriptions of many Victorian animal species. This will be very handy for biologists worldwide who don't have ready access to hard copies of this journal. Later on, rare books from MV and the libraries of other Australian institutions will be scanned and uploaded.

The high-quality scans are not just useful, but often quite beautiful. You get the whole book – covers, library labels, marbled endpapers and marks of age – not just the text within. Michael's favourites are the 1600s books in Latin with fantastical illustrations. "You'd never get to see these in a library, they're too fragile and valuable," he says. BHL puts these wonderful books in the hands of anyone.

Links

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia

Biodiversity Heritage Library

MV News: BHL visitors