Scottish greats such as Sir James Guthrie and international masters such as Degas and Picasso are already online as part of the new National Galleries Scotland Collection site, which will enable for the first time the entire National Collection to be digitally accessible.

Access to the Collection will be dramatically improved, with the online publishing of our entire catalogue of over 95,000 objects, of which over 35,000 records currently include digital images and the rest of the Collection will be digitised over the next five years.

The new site has been specifically designed to have a clean and intuitive interface which showcases the exceptional breadth and depth of the Collection. There is now also a stronger sense of engagement with the user and visitors to the site can log-in to their own account, while high-resolution images can be book-marked, zoomed into, and easily shared through social media.

As part of this broader project, the existing website will be redeveloped before the end of 2016, including the ‘Visit’, ‘What’s On’, ‘Shop’, ‘Education’, and ‘Research’ sections. They will soon adopt the new layout in order to create more exciting and engaging ways of interacting with the Collection.

There are 36 artworks by Pablo Picasso available to view online

“It is difficult to replace an entire website at once and we decided that our priority was to improve access to the collection for our users first,” said a spokesperson. “Launching the site in beta allows us to get feedback from users and continue to make improvements as the rest of the site is created. We are very interested to hear feedback from our users, so please feel free to get in touch.”

National Galleries Scotland expect that some of the information published may not be as complete as expected or may have issues with quality but decided that it was more important to make the data available to the public at the earliest opportunity and allow users to report issues they come across. “This approach has been adopted by many similar organisations and any issues raised will be reviewed and addressed as quickly as possible.”

Some of the portrait work of Sir James Guthrie available to view online

The new Collection site is currently classed as a trial ‘beta’ site, a near-complete test site that exists in parallel alongside the existing one.

For personal use, all of the Collection images are now available to download for free and visitors will also be able to order prints from a much wider selection, with the number of high-quality prints of newly-digitised works increasing from 600 to more than 25,000.

To give your feedback use the contact form.

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