The Last Museum is a new online website that brings together 5.8 million art works on one free platform. Not a functioning museum in itself, the website pulls collection records and images from thousands of institutions around the world. Why travel?
The Last Museum is the kind of sophisticated reference tool we didn't even dream of when I was a working librarian. Users can search by themes, moods, colors, subjects, or descriptive phrases without knowing an artwork’s title or artist. In other words, searching through ideas instead of just keywords.
However, this massive BOT scraping of digital content is somewhat controversial in the museum world. Although many artworks have entered the public domain, some institutions still claim rights over their own photographs, scans, or digital reproductions of those works. The debate on that goes on.
Also interesting-- the creators/developers of The Last Museum remain completely anonymous!
As far as I'm concerned, a good use for brilliant tech minds that might otherwise cause mischief on the Internet.
Anyway, fun to play around with on a rainy day.
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