Co-founded by the European Union, the Europeana database possesses digitized and digital content of Europe’s cultural institutions, from 3D models, audio recordings, prints, texts, and paintings. Europeana runs an Instagram account where they feature highlights of the collection. They also maintain a blog that makes posts on topics using images from Europeana’s database. The “Search” function allows one to find objects by keywords and send it through filters, such as media, language, and usage rights. Once one has selected an object, Europeana redirects one to a page with a description of the object, a link to it on an external site, a translation tool, and code for citing the image on Wikipedia. Additionally, at the bottom of an object’s page, the database lists related objects by subject matter. Users who have accounts can save items, searches, tags, and translate keywords into multiple languages.
The Google Cultural Institute created the Google Art Project to allow users to intimately access the “treasures” of art museums from their computers, smartphones, and internet-supporting televisions. Google Art Project provides museums with camera and video equipment in order to photograph objects, which permits users to zoom in on details of items, and reproduce a “street view” of exhibition spaces. One can explore the database with the search function, by museum collection, artist, artworks, and galleries created by Google users and museum curators. With the “Share” option, one can share objects and galleries through social media. The “Compare” function permits one to juxtapose and compare two objects housed in the same or different collections side by side, and the “Explore” option exposes one to visually similar objects and links to Wikipedia pages of related topics.
Smithsonian Collections Search Center
The Smithsonian Collections Search Center presents over nine million records from the museums, libraries, and archives of the Smithsonian Institution in a searchable index. Users can use keywords to search records including, but not limited to photographs, audio recordings, videos, films, paintings, and archival materials. User-created lists can further filter these items, and users can even help by adding relevant tags to objects to make them more accessible. In the “Browse by Category” tag, users can search records by subfields in the fields of Art, History, and Science. A curated “Highlights” section features categories centered on a particular theme. Google Maps factors into the “Items on Exhibit” section, in which one can select Smithsonian Institutions on a street-view map and see which items the institutions have on display.