[thomastjeffery]

It's cool to have a virtual tour of open gallery space, but it would be orders of magnitude cooler to have a virtual tour of the works in a museum's collection that are not on view.

Most museums are only able to show a few dozen or hundred works in their galleries at a time, but store thousands of works in their collection. In an effort to accommodate this reality, many museums publish a freely available database of their collection. There isn't really a standard practice for creating, maintaining, and publishing these databases, so it really depends on each museum's collections team to do that work; and it will always be a relatively low priority. Digital exhibitions could radically change that.

[chatmasta]

There’s a museum in Rotterdam called The Depot that always has all its works on exhibit and available to the public.

[thomastjeffery]

From Wikipedia:

> The entire deposit collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (more than 151,000 objects housed together, arranged in fourteen storage compartments with five different climates) is stored here and is publicly accessible, on a total floor area of 15,541 m2.

That's incredible.

[chatmasta]

You should probably have a tour guide on your first time there. Personally I was a bit confused which of the climate-controlled rooms I was actually allowed to enter (the doors all look like highly secure entrypoints). So I felt like I missed out on some exhibits and only scratched the surface of what they had on display (vs. in a filing cabinet).