Many museums now make all, or part, of their collections, available online, reducing the barriers of cost and travel. Here's some you can visit from home.
Visit 2+ Million Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Museums Free Online - Enjoy and explore some of the world's major art collections online, and, in some cases, download images for free.
68 Cultural, Historical, and Scientific Collections You Can Explore Online - An amazing variety of items to explore; from museum collections, to touring Ancient Rome, to historic cookbooks and interactive maps.
National Museum of African-American History and Culture Open Access - Explore and reuse thousands of digital items from the NMAAHC's collections.
The Library of Congress - Explore historic newspapers, photographs, sound clips, and legislative documents, archived historic webpages, links to international digital libraries, and the option to browse the digital collections by topic.
Digital Collections of the New York Public Library - There are over 800,000 prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more in this searchable collection.
Smithsonian Open Access - includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
NOAA Photo Library - Thousands of weather and space images, hundreds of images of shores and coastal seas, and thousands of marine species images ranging from whales to the most minute plankton.
Online Museum Collections of African Art - Global list of museums with online access to their African Art collections.
Museums with Collections and Exhibitions African Archaeology and Art - Click on the link, then scroll down the right-hand side of the page that opens to find links to these museums.
Ancient Manuscripts from the Libraries of Timbuktu - Timbuktu, Mali, is the legendary city founded in West Africa nine hundred years ago. Dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, these ancient manuscripts cover every aspect of human endeavor and illustrate the high level of West African civilization during the Middle Ages.
Museums with Asian Art Collections Online - Global list of museums with online access to their Asian Art collections.
Japanese National Treasures Online - This site provides high resolution images of some of the most treasured objects in classical Japanese art.
Digital Library of the Caribbean - 2.6 million online pages of images and texts relating to the Caribbean region, including newspapers, official documents, maps, histories, travel accounts, literature, poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts.
9 Priceless Artifacts Museums Should Return to Their Home Countries - Many items (beyond these nine) ended up in museums as a result of colonialist appropriation. That's a good thing to keep in mind when exploring museums.