It’s wonderful to see museums considering their digital presence as an extension of their purpose – online exhibitions and other digital projects greatly enhance the collections. This article at the New York Times describes the interconnectivity between museums and visitors that the digital provides, and also the possibility of connection between museums themselves:

Sooner or later, all museum websites will be interconnected, so that any museum might take advantage of scholarship produced by any other. There’s no reason, after all, that the Museum of Modern Art shouldn’t link its Jackson Pollock page to Pollock pages of museums throughout the world.

...Where is all this going? The British Museum has a succinct answer in the concluding sentence of its About Us page: “The website is not merely a source of information about the collection and the museum, but a natural extension of its core purpose to be a laboratory of comparative cultural investigation.”

I visited the “Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World” exhibition at LACMA a few years ago, and thanks to their digital archive of the exhibit I’m able to share videos like this with my students.

(Revised and republished April 19th, 2025)