Tourists cause obvious damage to museums. Crowds of visitors violate carefully protected microclimate of the premises, increase in humidity and bring the street dust and dirt on the soles of their shoes. Weight load on the floors of the most popular galleries and exhibits is very high. For example, the total weight of visitors to Hermitage is about 2.5 million tons annually. From such a terrible burden suffer the unique paintings on the walls of the rooms, and the parquet floor, which, by the way, is also a work of art. And this situation is the norm for all the popular museums or galleries.
The most interesting thing is that museums do not really need visitors. The main objective of their employees is to preserve, enhance and explore the treasures available to them, and not unsuccessful in their weight, attempts to explain the value of exposure to the crowd or the visitors, who do not understand in the history of art. Tourists themselves also are not always enthusiastic about the need to go for land, to stand in queues and walk miles of the museum halls, only because, coming to Paris and not visiting Louvre, is a bad habit.
Perhaps for these reasons in the early 90-ies the museums of the world have begun to move in virtual space. Today, almost every exhibit has its own web page, where you can find at least the basic information about the exhibited collections, hours of work facilities, the cost of tickets and how to reach it. But this, of course, was not enough. Gradually, museums have begun to spread on the Internet photographs of their collections, and then, with the development of technology, to create a virtual space on the web where you can get any picture or statue of the mechanism and to distinguish its three-dimensional image from all directions. Almost simultaneously, the possibility to search the collections, not only on the author’s works, but, for example, in his colors. One of the best expositions of virtual world can boast Hermitage, where will be able to easily walk and the Louvre or the Prado gallery.
Wishing to make a computer trip, or even just find out what museums exist in the world, stands on the site call the Virtual Library of Museums, which considers to be the most popular by country and by topics.
Following the digitization of real objects and the museums have come to turn the creation of exhibits that have no physical embodiment, and existing solely on the World Wide Web. Most of them were initially devoted to computers and digital art, and later there were sites of scientific laboratories institutions. Perhaps the oldest of the exhibits is a collection of computer-Museum of Computer Art, born in 1993 and dedicated to digital art and photography. Existed for in a web space more than a dozen years later, in 2008, the museum is still a real gallery, opened in Brooklyn.
But perhaps the most interesting opportunity to travel to galleries the world without leaving home, offer sites that collect and catalog a collection of various museums. After such a virtual gallery, you can get acquainted with the exposition, disparate parts of which are remote to many thousands of kilometers of ground, but collected in one place, provides a new view on the subject. For example, the Virtual Museum of Canada brings together the collection of 2500 local institutions, including the tiny exhibit. It is unlikely that even the most meticulous traveler could ever visit all of them in reality.
Of course, in order to carry out a computer trip, you need to have high-speed Internet channel and, preferably, a powerful computer. Otherwise, many of the opportunities provided by museum sites are inaccessible. For example, at the Museum of Hampsona you can download and to consider the objects from all sides (and even across) found during archaeological excavations Indian habitats in Arkansas.
It is believed that the relocation of the museum exhibits from the real world to a virtual world, sooner or later will lead to the closure of the real galleries and to reduce the number of tourist trips around the world.
