Explore the Victoria and Albert Museum Online

The V&A is, of course, one of the world’s premier museums of design and decorative arts.  They have recently announced that over a million items from their collections are now accessible online.

People using Search the Collections… will find images of more than 100,000 objects… The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to more basic inventory information which might include the maker, provenance, production technique and style… Users explore the site by clicking on images that scroll across the screen or by accessing the powerful search engine that identifies objects by type, maker, date, material or location in the V&A. Google maps show places of origin. Text mining technologies also allow searching of all the text associated with an object so for the first time researchers are able to move from one theme to another.

The example shown above is a board game from 1804 – “The New Game of Emulation Designed for The Amusement of Youth of both Sexes and calculated to inspire their Minds with an abhorrence of vice and a love of virtue.”  It was marketed as a morality game designed to lead children “to admire and adopt the virtues of Obedience, Truth, Honesty, Gentleness, Industry, Frugality, Forgiveness, Carefulness, Mercy, and Humility; and to view in their real colours the opposite vices of Obstinacy, Falsehood, Robbery, Passion, Sloth, Intemperance, Malice, Neglect, Cruelty and Pride.”  It is one of hundreds of games in the “games” category of the online collection.

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