Across the digital divide

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When the British Museum opened its doors in 1759, the founders’ goals were for it to be a national museum featuring all fields of human knowledge, open to visitors from across the world. Its model has remained consistent over the following centuries, but in 2020, an age of closed borders and lockdowns, achieving those founding principles became immeasurably more difficult.

The solution was to move the museum’s collection online. The British Museum has digitised many of its artefacts to make them more accessible to a wider audience, including a digital tour of its back catalogue offering a 360-degree view of items.

More recently, the museum has also sought to enter the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – digital assets stored on a blockchain. The museum’s NFTs, launched with NFT platform LaCollection, will feature the work of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Museums are not the only ones embracing technology to reach new audiences. Since the lifting of Covid-19 lockdowns, theatres, including London’s ...