Find and explore museums online

A trip to a museum is a great way to spend the day, but sometimes there is simply too much to see in one go. Thankfully, the internet provides a wealth of information and resources from museums both large and small, enabling you to enjoy what they offer from the comfort of your home.

Museum websites offer virtual tours, video and audio content and photographs of their vast collections online. We have scoured the web to find some of the most interesting and in-depth content that is on offer so you can take a trip to a museum without leaving the house.

There are some really varied and interesting ways to interact with the collections that museums hold online.

A lot of museums offer virtual tours, which is a great place to start: the Imperial War Museum and the Churchill Museum are two excellent examples of this.

Both let you view what’s on show with full-screen panoramas of the exhibitions and rooms. The Churchill Museum online tour includes a clickable map of the Cabinet War Rooms, and there’s also background information on each section.

We were also impressed with the interactive image library of Winston Churchill. You can zoom in anywhere on the page to view a range of images of the former British Prime Minister, and each image includes details of when and where it was taken. There is also video content to enjoy.

Museums the world over have websites that are available in English and many have some in-depth multimedia materials. One of our favourites is the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. While going to the actual museum might not be practical, there is a lot to explore on its website, with an excellent virtual museum feature.

The online catalogue includes more than 1,200 objects with detailed colour pictures and text descriptions. There is biographical detail, in-depth background information and even videos and animations to accompany some exhibitions.

Video and audio files can be downloaded to your PC, as can a PDF catalogue featuring every item on show at the Museo Galileo.

The website is easy to navigate and gives you a good sense of what’s on show. Videos can be viewed by theme or alphabetically. Alternatively, there is also a selection of rooms within Museo Galileo organised by themes complete with videos and accompanying information.

The Smithsonian Institute in the US has pages of interactive online content to enjoy.

To explore for yourself, head to the Smithsonian website and browse through the various institutions. Two parts we liked in particular were the virtual tour of the National Museum of American History and the topic explorer on the National Museum of Natural History.