Explore the collections online

We are creating new digital resources which will be launched over the coming year. These will offer ways to explore our exhibitions and collections both digitally and in person.

You can explore the virtual exhibition, A History Through Objects: Research and Innovation at the University of Birmingham on our exhibition page.

As part of our wider digitisation programme, we are currently conducting trials of 3D object scanning and you can explore the results of this on Sketchfab.

Object records are accessible through our online collections portal and we are continually updating this to add more objects including new images, information and research.

You can explore almost 400 artworks from the Campus Art Collection and African Collection through ArtUK, the online home for the UK's public art collections.  You can explore wider themes and related artists and create your own Curation of our collections and wider public art.

A small number of objects from the African Collection are included in Digital Benin.

Digital Benin brings together all objects, historical photographs and rich documentation material from collections worldwide to provide a long-requested overview of the royal artefacts from Benin Kingdom looted in the late nineteenth century. The historic Benin objects are an expression of Benin arts, culture and history, and were originally used as royal representational arts, to depict historical events, to communicate, to worship and perform rituals.

The digital platform introduces new scholarship which connects digital documentation about the translocated objects to oral histories, object research, historical context, a foundational Edo language catalogue, provenance names, a map of the Benin Kingdom and museum collections worldwide. Digital Benin connects data from 5,246 objects across 131 institutions in 20 countries.

Digital Benin’s scope focuses on objects looted by British forces from the Kingdom of Benin (now Edo State, Nigeria) in February 1897 and distributed in its immediate aftermath. Together, these events and processes led to the worldwide translocation of the objects shown on this platform. A small set of objects is included in the catalogue to represent the broader context in which the artistic production of Benin guilds is situated.  These include:

• Bini-Portuguese Ivories, produced and circulated outside West Africa in the 16th centuries
• objects produced in neighbouring regions of the kingdom
• a selection of works produced by named artists after 1930  

Objects that are included in the project from the Research and Cultural Collections fall under the last category and you can view them on the platform here.