In World Magazine's November 6th issue, they published a little blurb about Europeana:
"European museums have banded together to put some of their collections online. More than 6 million digital items from museums including the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the British Libray are accessible through europeana.eu/portal."
The site is currently in its beta phase, so they're still tinkering with the design and ironing out all the glitches. It seems like a pretty simple site at first glance, but there's deep waters to dive into here. Some of Europe's finest museums and libraries have made their collections available for online perusal. For the majority of us who will probably never be able to visit these places, at least we can have access to the vast collections and learn something from them.
You can explore the works through a time line, or search by specific pieces. If you have an account, you can save searches that you make and tag specific pieces, so that you can find easily re-find your favorite works of art. And Europeana doesn't just showcase the studio arts, but music and literature as well.
This site is also a great resource for writing research papers. All the works have the proper academic information attached to them. I don't how many times over the years I've been browsing the Internet, found a cool picture, but there wasn't enough info alongside it to be of any help. You can click on the image to view it at a good quality resolution not just a little thumbnail. You can see who created it, when, where, what museum it's currently housed in, and whether it's in the public domain or copyrighted.
Europeana also puts together virtual exhibits, drawing on its vast database to make for informative and interesting browsing. One of the current exhibits is about my favorite art movement: Art Nouveau.
Europeana is not be passed up--there's so much information available, and this could help you round out your art lessons.
