MANHATTAN — The Metropolitan Museum of Art re-launched its website Monday, giving online access to more than 340,000 works of art in the museum’s collection along.
The rebooted site also includes multimedia features on exhibitions, interactive gallery maps, suggested itineraries and a newly streamlined design for viewing the vast amount of information now available digitally.
The website overhaul has been three years in the making, museum officials said. The Met's site, created in 1995, hasn’t been updated in more than a decade.
The site aims to help "visitors move seamlessly between learning, planning, and participating online, and encountering face-to-face the magnificent works and the programs in our galleries," Thomas Campbell, director and CEO of the museum, said in a statement.
While smartphone users are often reprimanded in museums when taking out their devices, now they'll now be encouraged to do just that.
"We've also designed portions of the website to be optimized for smartphones, so that visitors can easily look up information about the works of art while viewing them in the galleries," said Erin Coburn, the Museum’s Chief Officer of Digital Media.
