Stuck at home? View cultural heritage collections online

With people self-isolating to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents and educators (as well as people looking for an art or history fix) may be looking to replace in-person trips to galleries, libraries, archives and museums* with online access to images of artefacts and information about them. GLAMs have spent decades getting some of the collections digitised and online so that you can view items and information from home.

* Collectively known as 'GLAMs' because it's a mouthful to say each time

Search a bunch of GLAM portals at once

I've made a quick 'custom search engine' so you can search most of the sites above with one Google search box. Search a range of portals that collect digitised objects, texts and media from galleries, libraries, archives and museums internationally:

The direct link is https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=006190492493219194770:xw0b7dfwb6b (it's just a search box, without any context, but it means you can do a search without loading this whole post)

Collections, deep zoom and virtual tour portals

Various platforms have large collections of objects from different institutions, in formats ranging from 'virtual exhibitions' or 'tours' to 'deep zooms' to catalogue-style pages about objects. I've focused on sites that include collections from multiple institutions, but this also means some of them are huge and you'll have to explore a bit to find relevant content. Try:

• ArtUK – paintings and sculptures from the UK
• Creative Commons search portal includes some cultural organisations – filter by 'source' to search specific institutions
• Digital Public Library of America for content from American libraries
• Endangered Archives Programme includes digitised records from around the world
• Europeana – a huge range of collections across Europe
• Google Arts and Culture – a more curated but still big set of images and tours
• iDigBio for digitised biological specimens
• Internet Archive has archived websites, digitised books, films and more
• National Library of Australia's Trove for content from Australian libraries
• Sketchfab has 3D models of cultural heritage objects
• Smarthistory (linked to Khan Academy)
• A special shout out to the Smithsonian's new open access site
• Virtual museum of Canada

Other links

Various articles have collected institution-specific links to different forms of virtual tours. Try:

• Museum Computer Network's Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections includes portals, online collections, virtual tours / online exhibits, and e-learning resources. You can tweet additional suggestions to @MuseumCN
• visiting some European museums (galleries) online
• a LinkedIn post to UK museums with online content (and donation options)

Things are moving fast, so let me know about other sets of links to collections, stories and tours online that'll help people staying home get their fix of history and culture and I'll update this post. Comment below, email me or @mia_out on twitter.