Virtual museum

A virtual museum is a digital entity that draws on the characteristics of a museum, in order to complement, enhance, or augment the museum experience through personalization, interactivity and richness of content. Virtual museums can perform as the digital footprint of a physical museum, or can act independently, while maintaining the authoritative status as bestowed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in its definition of a museum. In tandem with the ICOM mission of a physical museum, the virtual museum is also committed to public access; to both the knowledge systems imbedded in the collections and the systematic, and coherent organization of their display, as well as to their long-term preservation.

As with a traditional museum, a virtual museum can be designed around specific objects (akin to an art museum, natural history museum), or can consist of new exhibitions created from scratch (akin to the exhibitions at science museums). Moreover, a virtual museum can refer to the mobile or World Wide Web offerings of traditional museums (e.g., displaying digital representations of its collections or exhibits); or can be born digital content such as net art, virtual reality and digital art. Often, discussed in conjunction with other cultural institutions, a museum by definition, is essentially separate from its sister institutions such as a library or an archive. Virtual museums are usually, but not exclusively delivered electronically when they are denoted as online museums, hypermuseum, digital museum, cybermuseums or web museums.

The following museums were created with digital technology before the web gained any form of popularity or mass usability. CD-ROM and postal mail distribution made these museums available world-wide, before web browsers, fast connections and ubiquitous web usage.

The following online museums were pioneers. At that time, web pages were simpler, bandwidth was slower, the concepts of the online museum were still developing, and there were limited multimedia technologies available within web browsers. Some online museums began in other (not web site) electronic forms, or were established by existing physical museums. Some online museums have become significant sources of scholarly information, including extensive citations within .

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Wikipedia