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Digital milestone

Auckland War Memorial Museum. Photo: Meredith Foley.

Scoop Media, Auckland Museum marks digital milestone of Future strategy, 22 June 2016

Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Future Museum strategy has marked another milestone in delivery with close to one million records now free and available to the public online.

“A key platform of Future Museum, published in 2012, has been to invest in our commitment to make the Museum’s collections more accessible for everyone,” says Roy Clare, Auckland Museum Director. “In four years we have made great strides to unlock the museum experience online, with a third of our collection records now digitised. By opening up so many records to the public across the country and around the world we have dramatically extended the reach of the internationally-significant collections we act as kaitiaki (guardian) for.”

The records online include the living memorial Online Cenotaph and Collections Online. In May, over 250,000 of these records from the Museum’s natural sciences collection were added to an external resource, the Global Biodiversity information Facility (GBIF). Funded by governments around the world, the GBIF allows anyone, anywhere to access data about all types of life on Earth, and is shared across national boundaries via the Internet.

Collections Online was launched in July 2015 and nearly one year on, over three quarters of a million objects are freely accessible online with 2000 new objects being added every month. Auckland Museum is among the first museums in the world to exploit the advantages of ‘Linked Open Data’, sharing knowledge and presenting unprecedented opportunities for learning, research, and general interest. ‘Linked Open Data’ ensures that collections are transparent, automatically interconnected and easier and faster to search.

Access to the taonga (treasures) is free to the users around the world. This includes 375,688 images of which 200,000 are openly licensed for use and re-use. A dedicated photography team has taken over 36,720 high res images since November in a purpose-built photo studio inside the Museum, the first of its kind in New Zealand.

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