Your Paintings is a new web initiative by the #BBC in partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation. It aims to put the nation’s complete oil painting collection online.

“The UK holds in its galleries & civic buildings one of the largest collections of oil paintings in the world, a treasure trove of tens of thousands of individual works, including pieces by some of the world’s leading artists, from world famous names such as Picasso to Rubens to unknown local painters.

These paintings aren’t just of interest to art lovers, they also make up one of the biggest pre-photographic records of 600 years of British society, life and culture, a hugely important educational and historical resource.

And yet the public’s access to this incredible resource has to date been limited by physical constraints: some 80% of the works are in storage, or otherwise unavailable to view; those that can be seen are scattered around the country, looked after by a diverse range of institutions, from the major national galleries right through to individual council offices and even fire stations, with no way for the public to see the scale of the combined collection. The vast majority have never been published online before.

Now the Public Catalogue Foundation (a charity established to document and photograph this national collection) have teamed up with the BBC and thousands of galleries and collections right across the UK to make the entire national oil painting collection permanently viewable in one place for the first time, for free to the general public.

Our beta launch today showcases the first 63,000 of these paintings, covering works from over 800 collections by over 15,000 individual artists. This is the start of a rolling programme of releases – we’ll be updating the site with thousands of new paintings in the coming months, in line with the PCF’s photography and digitisation programme, with the ambition of having the entire national collection – some 200,000 paintings – online by the end of 2012.

We really hope you enjoy using the site, and we’d love you to contact us with any comments, suggestions or improvements.”

The 3D Documentary Explorer is a radical new way of telling the story of The Virtual Revolution, using video clips from the first two episodes of the series.Once you click to launch the Explorer, press pause or play to move between ‘Watch’ and ‘Explore’ modes. In ‘Explore’ mode, click the arrows to the right and left of the video to see pictures of web pages relevant to that clip. Click on the link above the web page to load it in your web browser.

Start exploring the documentary in 3D

Source: BBC – The Virtual Revolution – 3D Interactive Documentary Explorer.

The BBC contacted Rattle in Spring 2009 to help them think through different audience propositions for what is now A History of The World, a landmark series on Radio 4 produced in conjunction with the British Museum. The basic premise of the programme is to provide a history of the world through objects, including 100 from the British Museum which the radio programmes focus on, and others from regional museums. Now that the website is live, and the programmes are being broadcast 3 times a day, no less, we thought it’d be a good time to talk about some of the work we did.

Read more here: Designing A History of The World.

The BBC has teamed up with museums across Great Britain and Northern Ireland for an ambitious multi-media history project. A History of the World aims to collect objects with local and global resonances, with a hope of providing different perspectives on the events which shaped our world. The centrepiece of the project is a landmark series on BBC Radio 4, A History of the World in 100 Objects, which tells the story of 100 objects from the British Museum’s collection. A website has also been set up where people can submit their choices of objects which bring to life the momentous events from the past.

via BBC News – Digital museum’s object lesson in NI history.

The BBC and the British Museum have joined forces in an original and unprecedented public service partnership, focusing on world history. At its heart is a landmark series on BBC Radio 4, ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ which will broadcast from 18 January 2010.

This series is a narrative global history told through the British Museum’s unparalleled world collection. The series will tap in to the unique power of objects to tell stories and make connections across the globe. To produce the series the BBC and the British Museum have come together in an ambitious partnership to ensure the widest possible access and engagement across radio, television and online.

Read more: Medieval News: BBC and the British Museum creates ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’.

Though he’s known to schoolchildren to world over as the recipient of a nasty bump on the head from a falling apple – the true origin of Newton’s conceptualization of gravity comes from a little higher in the sky. So, in honor of Sir Newton’s birthday, here’s a short clip from the BBC explaining how we came to know why we don’t just fall right off the Earth:

Source: Happy Birthday, Isaac Newton! | BEYONDbones.

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

In Museum Boerhaave in Leiden there is through september 2010 a big exhibtion about Newton: NewtonMania.