Cincinnati museum gets Googlified

  • 2014-07-23
People who want to visit the Cincinnati Museum Center or the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) can now do so online, via the Google Cultural Institute.

The Museum Center has become the second such institution in Cincinnati, after the CAM, to go viral. The CAM went online last year, providing viewers with a virtual tour and a look at almost 400 artifacts and paintings.

Using Google, a visitor can “tour” more than 150 museums and their collections. The Google Cultural Institute went live in 2011, and uses the same software Google Maps uses in its Street View facility. Virtual tours via Google allow people to peek into corners, see exhibits and walk down the halls of various institutions, or search for a specific work or artist. It is even possible for a user to put together a personal gallery using items from the collections.

Among the works on view at the Museum Center are historical landscapes and portraits, as well as one of the works of famed naturalist John Audubon. There are also a number of John Casper Wild works on view; Wild captured views of the Riverfront and Downtown Cincinnati as they were in 1835.

Although Google has added a ‘Street Art’ category, there is nothing from Cincinnati there yet, though London, Rome, Bogota, and Paris are represented.

The Museum Center could work with brochure printers to create a handout for visitors to take with them, describing how the Google facility works.