Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has won a British Interactive Media Association award in the Arts and Culture category for its innovative Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource website.
Offering free high-quality access to the largest online collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world, the website features more than 2,000 fine and decorative artworks viewable in pixel perfect definition, thanks to Microsoft Silverlight imaging technology.
The award, which was announced last night, is the third high-profile award for the site since September.
"We did a lot of audience research beforehand which informed our brief," said Linda Spudle, online manager at BMAG, reflecting on the site's success.
"We used Silverlight for the zooming in of the images. It was an innovative thing to do at the time because other museums weren't using it."
The Microsoft Silverlight plug-in has enabled BMAG to offer online visitors the chance to study its vast collection of Pre-Raphaelite works, "as if seeing the real artwork in a museum".
"We just wanted to put images at the heart of the website," explained Linda. "There are too many digitisation projects that should have the images at the heart of it, but you can't really see them clearly. With our Pre-Raphaelites online resource we really wanted to get the wow factor from the collection."
The award comes on the back of two awards since the site launched in June 2009.
Last Friday BMAG scooped a DADI award in the Best Use of Technical Innovation category and in September it received an Interactive Media Award for Best In Class for Arts and Culture. The site is also on the shortlist for a BETT Award in January 2010.
Visit the Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource at http://www.preraphaelites.org
