Exploring museum collections online: some background reading

This great blog post from the Science Museum’s Digital Director, John Stack, outlines different ways cultural institutions, individuals, companies and academic researchers are beginning to explore new ways for audiences to discover online collections.

The traditional approach has been to enable audiences to carry out a simple search of the collections database. This however can limit discovery to those audiences who are already familiar with the collection and are looking for something they know is there or speculative searches which may or may not return useful results.

The examples that John provides all suggest different ways to discover online collections which counter these limitations.