Uffizi Gallery's Vast Sculpture Collection Goes Online in Interactive 3D Scans

Rather than museum worthy, beautiful crafted artworks made to stand the test of time, the Below the Surface exhibition and website displays the hundreds of years of detritus pulled from an Amsterdam construction site. The website allows visitors to interact with these objects and explore the changes in tools, usage, and culture over Amsterdam’s history.

While news of failures in the fight against climate change make headlines daily, there are many steps the everyday citizen can take to reduce their impact. Many don't know where to start though. That's where Project Drawdown comes in. This project is a global coalition of researchers, scientists, economists and others, that rate the impact of solutions, creating a way for people to see how they could possibly fit into the equation of climate solutions.

The project No estamos todas (“We are not all here”) was founded to call attention to rising rate of female homicide victims in Mexico as well as to commemorate victim’s lives. Artists are commissioned to make a woman’s portrait—often incorporating aspects of their lives—and these portraits are shared on the project’s Instagram account. Since November of 2017, over 80 portraits have been made and shared.

Tate Modern’s 2017 exhibition on painter Amedeo Modigliani included a virtual reality recreation of Modigliani’s final studio in Paris. Seated on wooden chairs with VR headsets on, visitors can explore the studio and hear firsthand accounts of the space from Modigliani’s friends.

The National Gallery of Art’s “Just Us” program brings seniors with memory loss symptoms to the museum for ‘meditation’ on paintings. Using the paintings as prompts, visitors are encouraged to react to and interpret what is before them mentally engaging them and providing an opportunity for socialization.

To combat the banned books war and issues with book access, the Books Unbanned program offers free online access to the library’s entire collection for 13-to-21-year-olds. The program has already issued more than 5,100 cards and checked out 20,000 materials. And because the program is funded independently, it can offer books to people out of state.

The Internet Archive is a digital library of around 544 billion archived web pages, most of which are found using a bot that crawls the web and saves snapshots. However, a self-described loose collective of volunteer activist archivists, known as the Archive Team,' individually monitors and preserves websites at risk of being abruptly taken down. Using donated bandwidth and hard drive space on the archiving application “Warrior,” they systematically download sites they fear will be deleted. The downloads are saved within the Internet Archive database, which is available to the public.

The Fayette County Traveling Museum collects, preserves, and shares Uniontown’s Black history. The owners sift through archives, libraries, and donated boxes of materials, which are displayed as educational resources. The museum, which before COVID-19 was set up at schools and churches, details the early history of African Americans, both enslaved and free, the town’s Underground Railroad stop, prominent Black community figures, and the area’s Klu Klux Klan presence. Video and oral histories of older residents also encourage young people to explore their history and make the information more accessible.

School districts and cities in California are looking to create their own local Wifi networks as a long-term solution to the digital divide, and an alternative to hotspots. Some are even becoming internet service providers themselves (ISP) — efforts, they say, that will make it easier to provide internet access to those who can’t afford it.

Mental health agencies in North Carolina have partnered with a mobile phone carrier to provide data-enabled smartphones to individuals who lack access to technology during the pandemic. Because this doesn't provide a solution to all, however, mental health experts are also meeting with patients outside in social distanced settings.