A museum visit used to start with a building. You’d find the entrance, get past it, and proceed to see what the curators had allowed you to experience. Increasingly, it now begins with a search bar. Type a name into the National Gallery of Ireland’s online collection search, and over 14,000 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and decorative objects become available for inspection. The quiet revolution in Dublin’s museums is reflected in their websites, which have traded noticeboards for databases and serve as both expositions and publicity tools. The Irish Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, the Chester Beatty, and the Hugh Lane Gallery all grapple with a question that has no definite answer: what does a museum without walls look like?
IMMA tackles the issue head-on, offering over 3,000 objects in its online collection. It has pioneered “IMMA Online,” an umbrella term covering the gallery’s virtual exhibitions, talks, education resources, and online magazine. The eponymous virtual exhibition The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now organizes its chapters around thematic pillars. Themes include “Queer Embodiment,” “The Anthropocene,” “Social Fabric,” and “Protest and Conflict.” The virtual exhibition, along with talks, fits into the social mission of making the gallery space accessible to everybody. This is perhaps best demonstrated by IMMA’s ability to provide a rich online educational experience that may be more accessible to people with disabilities than its Kilmainham base. IMMA’s most valuable lesson lies in demonstrating how a physical gallery can meaningfully continue its work outside its walls.
The National Gallery’s digital offering, by contrast, is more functional than flashy. After choosing an author or title and narrowing the search results by category, the user gains access to an endless gallery of images. The National Gallery’s latest public strategy makes “increasing access to [their] digital collection” an institutional priority. Paired with the website’s usefulness for browsing, the National Gallery’s strength lies in broad accessibility. A database might not be an exhibition, but the ability to discover Irish painting and sculpture from a browser window might be more useful to an inquisitive teenager than yet another guided tour.
As a small museum with delicate, fragile artifacts, the Chester Beatty has reason to believe that digitisation can offer a viewing experience that’s different from what its visitors can expect from behind the glass. As of December 2023, the Chester Beatty has digitised 26 per cent of its total collection, making it available online as open-access Creative Commons content. The 13 language options in the Creative Commons audio tours, as well as the 3D models of selected objects, allow the visitor to inspect them from all angles. The annual report for 2024 records approximately 41,800 virtual visitors, and the digital version of Heavenly Flowers has seen 685 unique visitors. Looking at miniatures and netsuke in all their intricate detail can be a satisfying experience — one that’s unmatched by anything the Chester Beatty can offer in its physical space.
Finally, the Hugh Lane Gallery provides the most tangible local example of a museum that must rely on its digital presence to provide access to its collections and programming. While the building undergoes refurbishment, the website hosts online versions of the collection: the Impressionist paintings, the reconstructed studio of Francis Bacon, and the stained glass of Harry Clarke. The same website presents a preview of the 2026 Culture Club season, whose highlights include a study day devoted to Hugh Lane’s stained glass. The Hugh Lane Gallery asks its viewers a different question: what can a museum offer in its absence? It demonstrates that when the opportunity arises, digitisation can offer a useful continuation of an interrupted museum experience.
Yet none of this reproduces the fact of being there. A website can’t replicate the feeling of a slow walk from one end of a gallery hall to another. It can’t replicate the presence of others, the way natural light filters through glass, or the quiet intimacy of a single object on display. Museums are, and perhaps should remain, grounded in the material environment. Studies seeking to quantify the impact of a museum visit have consistently found that people feel more socially connected and intellectually stimulated when they stand in a museum. Amanda Tinker’s 2024 review of research on museum digitisation concludes that it fails to account for the phenomenological aspects of museum visits and therefore “do[es] not engage fully with the embodied experience” of standing before a painting or object. These findings suggest that, rather than attempting to determine whether a museum website could replace a physical museum, one should ask what a physical museum can’t do without a website.
A discussion of museums and digitisation would be incomplete without addressing how digitisation promotes inclusivity, access, and diversity; however, it also demonstrates some of its limitations: the ability to use an object, exhibit, or museum online largely depends on its capacity to represent itself digitally. From selection and metadata practices to interface design and technical specifications, every choice will fail to accommodate users while centering others. Hanna Bertoldi and Mikala Narlock’s 2024 scholarship on museum digitisation concludes that its perceived democratic nature “belies the differential ways in which digitization practices operate within unequal institutional contexts.” This is especially evident in digitisation’s ability to represent certain collections as more worthy of engagement, outreach, and preservation than others. The most successful museum websites, then, are those that recognize the difference between online and offline and seek to leverage it as a set of opportunities. None of them replicate the experience of being in the room, though that was probably never the point.
