When museums offer online access to their collections in digital form, they are concerned with the dissemination of knowledge and exhibition of objects. The web offers the opportunity to deliver curated multimedia virtual exhibits to wider and remoter audiences, and to make accessible collections that are hidden in storage even in the physical museum.

The National Gallery, London was one of the first to make its entire collection available online. Its catalogue provides virtual visitors multiple ways of accessing and searching the collection: users can browse the artist index, view paintings by time period or theme, etc. Other museums have embarked on similar projects: for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is involved in an on-going project to make is entire collection available on the web, allows sophisticated keyword searching of its database.
        
La Tène 1a fibula,
circa 475-400 B.C.                 


The digitized collections of multiple participating museums are available through a centralized database. For example, the Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) lets online visitors search its Image Gallery, to which more than 950 museums in all specializations across the nation have contributed images from their separate collections.

Each year the Museums and the Web conference gives "Best of the Web" awards to exemplary museum web sites. Below are the 2003 "Best of the Web" winners in two categories related to virtual exhibit design:

Best On-Line Exhibition--A tie:
The Smithsonian Institution's  Corridos Sin Fronteras
The Peabody Essex Museum's  Yin Yu Tang

Best Innovative or Experimental Application:
The Fundación Cisneros's  Colección Cisneros

Gateways to museum and museum-related web sites:
Hosted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), the Virtual Library's museum page is the ultimate gateway to museums online.

MuseumStuff.com

Museumland.com

Several Canadian Museums with rich online content:

Virtual Museum of Canada
National Gallery of Canada
Canadian Museum of Civilization

Totally virtual museums:

MuseumLink's Museum of Virtual Museums page provides a neat list of online-only collections.
The Louvre
The Met
The Seattle Art Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Fine Arts Musem - Boston
The Tate Museum
The Tate-Online displays exhibits specifically designed for digital representation. The Tate online gallery contains a variety of interactive exhibits with links to web sites of interest.