Digital History of Virtual Museums

Abstract

Many thousands of virtual museums exist on the Internet, demonstrating very diverse and significant museum resources, showcasing the treasury of humankind. These resources have come a long way in their evolution over past decades. The history of virtual museums began long before they appeared on the Internet, and the concept of virtual museums needed to be established in order to become an essential and effective means of accomplishing new museum functions in the digital age. Through the designing of such a concept, the creation and development of museums' information resources, websites and various digital initiatives have become the keys to the success of museums in the digital environment today. This article considers the concept of a virtual museum, traces the transition of virtual museums from analog and interim multimedia formats to the online environment. The author surveys the crucial moments in the history of virtual museums and the stages of their development from the digital turn to their appearance on the Internet and subsequent transformation after this transition. In this article examples of museum information resources from North America and Europe, Japan and Australia are traced back to the first virtual museums online in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of materials from web archives, strategies for creating the first virtual museum resources on the WWW are identified.

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