British Telecom builds an online museum

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The world’s oldest telecommunications company, British Telecom (BT), has created an online archive of nearly 500,000 photographs, documents and letters gathered since 1846, according to the Art Newspaper.

The year-long project, New Connections, is due to be completed by July and is a collaboration between BT, Coventry University and the National Archives and cost 1 million pounds, 745,000 pounds of which was funded by Jisc, a digital technology charity.

BT has also founded Connected Earth, an online museum of communication based on physical collections of historic items held in museums around the United Kingdom, including the National Museum of Scotland and the Museum of London, according to Art Newspapers.

The archive is broad in scope, covering gender relations in the workplace, advertising and the impact technology has had on society. Highlights of the collection, which is housed in London and is recognized by Unesco, include photographs of the queen making the first automatic long-distance telephone call from Bristol to Edinburgh in 1958 and the first U.K. telephone exchange dating from 1878.