National Museum launches online exhibits

The National Museum (NM) has opened two of its exhibitions online. The online exhibitions were created by the museum team in a week using a platform created by the Academy of Sciences. The museum, like other state cultural institutions, has been closed to the public since 10 March, resulting in a monthly loss of CZK 10 million in revenue.

In addition to the entrance fee, the museum also lacks money for renting space. “What the overall financial impact and losses will be, I cannot say exactly at the moment,” the director said. According to the annual reports of the Ministry of Culture, the state’s annual subsidies for NM amounted to more than half a billion crowns before reconstruction. The last annual report is from the year 2018, where the budget of the National Park also includes investments into repairs, the state subsidy in that year was CZK 1.2 billion. The museum was reconstructed for 3.5 years, closed for seven years, and overhauled cost CZK 1.8 billion.

The Ministry of Culture closed 29 organizations to the public on 10 March due to coronavirus. In the meantime, many private and public institutions have made their collections, exhibitions, and other projects available online. Often it is only a passive viewing of digitized artifacts.

The National Museum opens the Velvet Revolution exhibitions called the Velvet and Labyrinth of Information and the Press Paradise. He points out that online exhibitions are optimized for desktop or laptop due to high resolution. They cannot be viewed on mobile platforms.

According to the spokesperson, there will be other exhibitions in the coming days, such as Račte enter the theater, Import / Export / Rock ́n ́roll, or Home in Siberia. The National Museum is gradually planning to open virtually all its current exhibitions and then start to hold new exhibitions online. Educational projects for children and youth are also being prepared.

Each curator or author will guide the visitor through the online video exhibition. Subsequently, the candidate will see photographs, documents, collection items, and audio-visual materials associated with the exhibitions accompanied by the voice of the Czech director, moderator, and traveler Petr Horký.

The public can also view the reconstructed National Museum Historical Building from home through Google street view or see the exhibits at www.esbirky.cz.

In the second half of this year, permanent exhibitions were to be gradually opened at the National Museum.