From today more than 17,000 works of art in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection can be seen on the revamped collection website. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has been the steward of a famed collection for more than 165 years. It is a place where different approaches have encouraged thirteen generations of Rotterdam residents to look at the world with new eyes. The eclectic collection contains around 150,000 objects, but only about 8% of them are on display in the museum galleries. On the new website visitors can get information about works they’ve seen in the museum and browse at will through much larger parts of the collection, which are shown in context – surrounded by contemporaries, related objects, museum galleries, or themes, schools and techniques. Layered information makes the website a source of information for enthusiastic museum visitors and professionals as well as for schoolchildren and students. The website was developed in collaboration with DOOR, the culture label of the creative digital office IN10.

A journey through art history
The new website, collectie.boijmans.nl, is set up as a journey through the history of art. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the only museum in the Netherlands where visitors can get a complete overview of western decorative art from 1400 to the present day based on international masterpieces: from the world-famous works of Jheronimus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Rembrandt to the birth of Impressionism and Modernism with paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Piet Mondrian; from a very unusual collection of works by the Surrealist artists Salvador Dalí and René Magritte to modern art with work by Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Joseph Beuys. Work by national and international contemporary artists and the internationally famous Dutch Design can also be found in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection.

Digital storytelling
Everything in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection has its own story to tell. Every page about a work of art on the collection website is enhanced with this information, which challenges the public to investigate further. If visitors look for the Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte’s Not To Be Reproduced , they are also shown related objects: works of art in the same gallery, other works by Magritte and videos about Not To Be Reproduced and about Magritte. Other areas, such as movements, techniques and historical events that place the collection in a wider perspective are explained on special story pages. All the website content is easy to share on social media.

The visitor experience
Many museums’ collection websites focus on ‘looking at pictures’. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen considers it important to present the works in an informative context where smart links are created between artists’ biographies, object descriptions, audio and video files and related objects. Collection Boijmans Online is user-friendly with better search functionality and contextual information.

Online knowledge transfer
As the founder and pioneer of such things as ARTtube, the international museum video channel, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has led the way in online knowledge transfer for years. The new media are not a goal in themselves for the Education Department and the museum’s public information service: they are used to enhance visitors’ experience. People are increasingly used to seeking information themselves, sharing it and adding their own point of view. The internet is a tool used to prepare for a visit to a museum: which works can be seen in the galleries, which route to take and if there is a video about an exhibition. Experience shows that after a museum visit people often consult online media to drill deeper into the content. Online channels contribute greatly to the quality of looking.
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