In early 2020, museums across the country were closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In order to meet the cultural needs of people during the quarantine, cultural institutions vigorously provided online exhibition resources, resulting in a boom for online exhibitions.

As of the beginning of this month, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) has organized museums around the country to launch online exhibitions using existing digital resources, providing the public with safe and convenient online services to experience exhibitions without leaving their homes.

SACH launched "dating online museums" on its official Weibo and promoted a demonstration project of online exhibition resources for museums across the country.

By the beginning of march, more than 300 museums and 370 online exhibition projects had been released on the platform, and relevant content was still being updated.

Museums across the country are taking action.

According to preliminary statistics, more than 1,300 museums have exhibited more than 2,000 items online through websites, Weibo and WeChat.

Weibo has become an important platform for "online museum visiting," and the official Weibo of museums at all levels has been used to push online exhibitions. Seven topics related to "online museum visiting" have been generated.

Although the online exhibition has many limitations, its own advantages are obvious.

First of all, it is constantly open with no closing time so that hundreds of millions of visitors can freely visit the exhibits anytime and anywhere. This is something that traditional exhibitions cannot achieve.

In addition, with the help of advanced digital technology, cultural relic images can be clearly displayed from multiple angles, allowing the audience to see some details that cannot be seen at the scene.

Moreover, viewing the exhibition alone eliminates the trouble of queuing and crowding, and enables people to appreciate the cultural relics with more concentration.

At present, Beijing, together with provinces like Hebei, Jilin, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and cities like Suzhou, has established a big data cloud platform for museums, so that the public can directly enjoy exhibitions and collections with their mobile phones.

Now, museums across the country use new forms and technologies such as animation, games, VR and AR to constantly update and enrich online cultural resources and provide services of holographic image appreciation, virtual touch, and immersive experience, surly can attract a large number of museum fans.

(Top image: A museum in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, southwest China. /VCG)