// METAMUSEUMS

For all loyal followers, MetaMuseums.com will from now consist of the Twitter account @metamuseums

Until Tuesday, if history buffs wanted a glimpse of the Israel Museum's vast collection — including a 9,000-year-old carved human face found in the Judean Desert — they would have to travel to Jerusalem to see it.

Now, through a joint venture with Google Inc., people from around the world can examine the ancient Neolithic artifact, which the museum says is the oldest in the world, in greater detail than ever before with a simple click of a mouse from the comfort of their own home.

The mask is just one of 520 objects made available as part of the museum's partnership with the Google Art Project, an online compilation of high-resolution images of artwork from galleries worldwide, as well as a virtual tour of the museums using the high-tech giant's Google Street technology.

Did the visitor:

attend? (physically)

participate? (mentally)

make sense of the place? (spiritually)

New York Subway creates smartphone app for subway station art.

basic categories include:

collections management

data management

user interface

querying

reports

technical requirements (e.g. training)

Thieves dressed as police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. After holding the security guards in the basement, the thieves stole a dozen or so works of art worth over $300 million. The Museum never recovered the art, some of which included a Vermeer, Rembrandt and Manet.

RedEye On Demand, a digital manufacturing service and business unit of Stratasys, Inc., has collaborated on a project with the Smithsonian to create one of the largest 3D-printed, museum-quality historical replicas in the world.