Back in 1914, Charles Trick Currelly, the Royal Ontario Museum’s founding director and the force that drove it into being, opened his brand-new institution with a very important personal imperative intact: That the ROM be on a streetcar line, so it could be reached by anyone and everyone, regardless of their social or economic status.

From its very beginning, the ROM has been a museum of the people, and public access has been an embedded notion of its mission for just as long. But with a collection of more than 6 million objects, not to mention a depth and breadth of research spanning the entire world, how much access has really ever been possible?

Think of it this way: At any given time, the ROM has on display across its 40 gallery spaces some 35,000 objects — around one-half per cent of its total holdings. And that’s after the 2007 Crystal expansion, which increased gallery space by 100,000 square feet.

So what’s an encyclopedic institution to do? Go where there’s room: Online. Over the next five years, the ROM is making huge efforts to make its vast collection truly public. Enter Mark Keating, the museum’s first-ever chief information officer. Keating, who arrived about six months ago, has been attending to the nuts and bolts — server infrastructure upgrades, building a new, robust wireless network — but the virtual collection is his baby, and public access in the truest sense is his reason for being.

“That’s what I was brought in to do,” he says, matter-of-factly. “To put a window on it, and to make it public.”

The museum won’t say what it expects the initiative to cost, but it will not be small. Within a year, the ROM will establish five full-time photography studios — it currently has one — and hire full-time staff to man them. And that’s just the raw material of the project, which will then be catalogued, processed and enhanced with value-added extras like video interviews with curators to make it more user-friendly than a massive database.

The ROM, which is at the very beginning of its own process, is a little late to the party. The idea of the open-content museum — where collections are digitized and made available to the public with no restrictions, online — seems rooted in a 2009 TED conference address by Tim Berners-Lee, credited as the creator of the World Wide Web.

At the conference, Berners-Lee made an appeal for museums to embrace the idea of being public institutions in a holistic manner that only the digital realm could enable. Open your collections completely, online, he implored, so that they might “be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways they never could have imagined.” Then, he started a rallying chant that the audience quickly joined: “Raw data now, raw data now.”

Opening a digital window on the museum’s vast holdings can have several effects: It can add bottomless depth to the museum experience, as the visitor can reference countless objects when faced with just one, or open the valve on a breadth of information providing context a physical gallery can’t. For those physically unable to come to the museum, period, like shut-ins or those suffering from severe illness, the virtual museum becomes their portal to a rich, unimagined universe.

Over the past several years, museums all over the world have heard the call. As long ago as 2011, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam started making its collection available; it now has some 200,000 images on its site ready and waiting to be used by anyone, for any reason.

It was the first domino, and spurred many others: Shortly afterwards, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington followed suit. Now, there are more than 50 major museums in North America alone with significant portions of their collection available online.

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In Canada, the ROM is the first to attempt anything even remotely this scale. The sheer size of its collection dictates the enormity of the endeavour; compare, say, to the Art Gallery of Ontario, whose entire collection tops out around 90,000.

The collection itself not withstanding, the ROM also has hundreds of thousands of old photographs that it will be digitizing as well. But the ROM won’t wait to break the million-mark before it starts to open its digital doors. “Once we start, we’re just going to make it available,” Keating says. “Because that’s when you can start to have some fun with it.”

What kind of fun? Anything from experiences in a gallery where a viewer can unlock the story behind an object through the ROM’s mobile app, to simply opening a virtual door to the museum’s vaults.

“Let’s say you’re really interested in a certain kind of pistol that’s on display,” Keating says. “We might have dozens of them in the back of the house, so by the time we’re through, you’ll be able to see all of them. Objects on display aren’t just objects anymore — they’re doorways into the museum’s holdings.”

For now, the path inside runs through the photography studio of Brian Boyle, the ROM’s chief photographer and a 40-year veteran of the museum. On the museum’s lower level, Boyle has been diligently capturing the collection, piece by piece, for months.

“There’s a lot of weight on these shoulders,” Keating laughs, nodding to Boyle. “But it’s about time, right Brian?” Boyle agrees. “It’s bloody well about time,” he says. “It’s exciting. It’s really exciting.”

Shortly, the effort will grow by leaps and bounds: With five studios running full time in the near future, Keating sets a goal of 2021 for the museum to have 1.5 million objects online.

If that sounds like a far cry from 6 million, consider: The ROM has thousands of specimens of various birds, bugs and other creatures, and not every single one needs to be digitized. “You can only shoot so many salamanders,” Keating laughs, but then turns serious. “If I’m a researcher in, say, Australia, I want to see all the different specimens of salamanders. It’s important to me. And we’ll get to that point.”

“But at this point, really it’s the simple fact that this collection belongs to the public, and the onus is on us to get that out there. Collecting is expensive, and it represents an enormous amount of consideration and thought. To have it all sitting in storage just doesn’t make sense.”