Google Cultural Institute

Google Cultural Institute is an initiative unveiled by Google following the 2011 launch of the Google Art Project. The Cultural Institute was launched in 2011, and put 42 new exhibits online on October 10, 2012.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} It is "an effort to make important cultural material available and accessible to everyone and to digitally preserve it to educate and inspire future generations."^[6] As of June 2013, it included over 6 million items - photos, videos, and documents.^[7] The Cultural Institute has partnered with a number of institutions to make exhibition and archival content available online, including the British Museum,^[8][9][10] Yad Vashem,^[11][12] the Museo Galileo in Florence,^[13] the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum,^[14] and the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw.^[15][16] The earliest notable project was a searchable archive and online digital exhibition series, in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, which allowed people to access Nelson Mandela's personal diaries and previously unreleased drafts of his manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. ^[17]

The Cultural Institute includes (and increasingly subsumes) the Google Art Project, which features high-resolution images of artworks from museums in over 40 countries; the World Wonders Project, which presents three-dimensional recreations of world heritage sites; and archival exhibitions, many in partnership with museums around the world.^[18]

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