User:Islandbaygardener/List of Museum Collections online

This is a list of museums with on-line collection catalogues, organized by continent where the museum is located. A museum collection is a collection of often unique objects that forms the core of its activities for exhibitions, education, and research. This differentiates it from an archive or library, where the contents may be more paper-based, replaceable and less exhibition oriented. These collections are widely varied.

Some museums have worked on digitising their collections. Digitised collections can include books, artworks, objects, photography, journals, newspapers, music, sound recordings, film, maps, diaries, and letters as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work. Online catalogues of museum collections can include basic core data fields associated with each object or more extensive records including photographs and video of each object. Researchers make use of such catalogues to investigate the cultural heritage of the world. Some of these catalogues provide content to cultural portals that aggregate digitised cultural collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This type of portal provides a point of access to invisible web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. This list includes cultural portals that aggregate digitised cultural collections of museums.