Colonial Williamsburg offering eMuseum

Colonial Williamsburg’s collection of historic pieces is going high-tech.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is making images, descriptions and object histories of all 60,000 of its pieces available on the Web in a new eMuseum. So far, about 3,200 objects are available, with more being added monthly.

Officials say it’s the latest attempt to make the collections broadly accessible for scholars, historians, collectors and the general public. The eMuseum allows Colonial Williamsburg to show off portions of its collections that are too fragile or light-sensitive for frequent exhibition.

Online visitors will be able to search the database by object maker, material, date or type, among other categories.

The Web address for the eMuseum is http://emuseum.history.org/code/emuseum.asp.