IT and Museums: Museums of Thuringia cooperate to launch a joint website

On December 19th 2011 18 museums of Thuringia (Germany) opened a share of their treasures on a joint website “Museums in Thuringia” (Museen in Thüringen).

The new portal provides free access to over 2,000 images of museum exhibits in high resolution, and relevant scientific descriptions. Paintings, sculptures, articles from porcelain, archaeological artifacts, historical technical devices and many other museum objects now can be easily found on a one-stop resource. Representatives of the museum association promise to add other 400 exhibits to the portal by the end of the year.       

Users may now search for images and texts, enlarge images to get a better look at their details, get information on museums, staying up-to-date with current exhibitions and other events, and take part in thematic tours around exhibitions.

With this new portal scientists and researchers, along with all Net surfers get permanent access to museum exhibits. But, above all, this is a measure against the vulnerability of the cultural heritage. A 2004 fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar destroyed 50,000 volumes, some of them irreplaceable.

The new website is also a good chance for all its participants to win attention of the general public and present their museum collections. At present the project brings together 18 museums out of 200 operating in Thuringia. Among them are: the City Museum of Jena, Thuringia Folklore Museum in Erfurt and Wartburg Foundation in Eisenach.

“Museums in Thuringia” portal was launched as a part of “Digitization of museum exhibits of Thuringia” project, which at the same time supports the EU initiative in digitization of cultural heritage. This resource also cooperates with the German Digital Library and European Digital Library.

To digitize 2 200 museum exhibits of Thuringia the Ministry of Culture has allocated over €1 million, in the upcoming year it is planning to offer €300 000. The collections of Thuringia are said to total 4,5 million objects. That’s why a complete digitization of museum treasures in Thuringia may last for some decades.