From the Carnelian seal-stone of the Vehdin-Shapur to a 20th-century squirrel parka worn by the Yup’ik of Alaska, the British Museum and Google have announced details of a digital partnership allowing people to view in detail nearly 5,000 objects online.

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The project is one of the biggest yet by the Google Cultural Institute which, since 2011, has been putting museum collections online and using its Street View technology to allow virtual tours.

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.

“That Enlightenment fantasy, about 25 years ago became an internet possibility, and today, thanks to the Google Cultural Institute, it is a practical reality. Every person on the planet, whether they are in Brazil or China, Mozambique or India, will be able to walk round the British Museum. They will be able to use the collection as if it were their own collection and explore the world in their own way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Google employee photographs exhibits at the British Museum. Photograph: British Museum

He hopes it will encourage more people to visit the museum in person. “It allows them to come better informed; to look and not just to see,” he said.

The museum already has a strong internet presence and 3m objects in the collection are already available to see online. But they mostly have an academic audience and it does not have the reach of the new partnership, said Chris Michaels, the museum’s digital head.

So far, there are 4,859 objects available to look at in detail online. They include one of the museum’s most important Chinese scrolls – 4th-century Admonitions scroll, which is only ever available to view for a few months of the year because it is so fragile. It is available to see in particular zoom detail after Google spent three days photographing it.

The indoor Street View footage meanwhile took 15 months to film because it had to be done out of normal visiting hours. “It is a huge organisational process for a place as big as this,” said Michaels.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Museum of the World microsite enables users to browse exhibits according to age and area of origin. Photograph: British Museum

The museum joins around 800 other cultural institutions that are already part of the Google project.

The scale of the British Museum project is striking. It is the largest space ever captured on the indoor Street View, and there are various addons, such as specially curated virtual exhibitions – Celtic Life in Iron Age Britain, for example – and a Museum of the World microsite linking objects on a timeline.

Michaels said: “We are a big complex entity, bringing us to this is one of the most complex tasks for both of us to do.”



Amit Sood, director of the Google Cultural Institute, said one aim was to “bridge the gap between high culture and popular culture”. If it gets fans of internet cat videos interested in cat sculptures in the British Museum they will have done their job, he said.



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