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Hi there,

My name is Anna Mikhaylova, and I’m the founder of this project. This is the first post here, and I will be adding one or two more every week. At the beginning, it will mostly be about museum computing in Russia, but later it might become wider.

Brief information about me: worked as a tour guide in Peterhof and St. Petersburg, spent two years at the IT department of the Kunstkamera Museum, graduated from St. Petersburg State University, currently a student at Leicester University and independent museum consultant.

In this post I am going to dig into the complicated relationship that some Russian museums have with the Internet.

One Website to Bind Them All

The starting point can perhaps be the creation of the website “Museums of Russia” in 1996.

Kirill Nasedkin, the then chief of the IT department in the State Darwin Museum (Moscow) came up with the idea of the Russian Cultural Network, an online resource for promoting Russian cultural heritage in the world. The idea was to present as many Russian museums on the Internet as possible. As a result, more than 3000 cultural institutions including museums, both state and private, galleries and exhibition halls are presented on this website now. Each cultural institution has its own page where standardized information is given: address, contact details, brief history of the organisation et cetera. Information is presented in patterned way; this is achieved by using a default template. The only thing that is left for the museum staff to do is to provide the content managers of the website with the required information. This project is still regularly updated. That website seems to be a rational choice for those institutions which are not able to invest money in their own websites.

Baby Steps

Approximately at the same time when the “Museums of Russia” was created major museums started launching their own websites. The pioneers in the field were the Kunstkamera museum, the State Hermitage, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. These first websites were practically just flyers which provided general information about museums: admission fees, contact details and brief information about the collections. There was no direct connection between these websites and the collections management systems of the museums.

Introducing New Technology

In the beginning of the 2000s the situation changed dramatically, when a new version of the “KAMIS” collections management system was launched. The new version included a special web module, and those museums which had purchased this module were now able to publish their collections online directly from the museum database. Since that time online publications of museum collections have become an integral part of everyday routine for major museums. The Rybinsk State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum Preserve was the first one to publish all of its collections online which was in 2000. Today you can browse through the collections of the Kunstkamera museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Darwin Museum and others online. In order to celebrate its 250th anniversary The State Hermitage is going to launch a new version of its website in 2014. A significant part of the museum collections will be available on this website, as well as virtual tours and panoramas.

In the late 2000s Russian museums started using social media, and we’ll talk about that next time.