Why isn’t there museum.google.com?

Go to the front page of Google’s company overview and there’s their primary goal.

Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I doubt there is any better at organising information. So what could Google do to organise the world’s information in museums?

Google Collections - I’m not sure I’ve met anyone 100% happy with their collection management software, just like people weren’t happy with email until Gmail came along. Google Collections would need to be completely online with a set of mobile apps,  import/export functionality with as many existing programmes, conform to the various standards, allow to be customisable to fit into a museum’s own website theme, have APIs available to all museums and just do something to make the whole process quicker and easier for all museums, even the small ones with nothing but volunteers. And make it free.

Google Museum Maps – Take detailed architectural plans of all museums to make accurate outlines of exhibition spaces. Create online tour maps with details about room names, exits and the like. Google MuseView – Google get one of those massive multi camera tripod things and walk around a museum with in on a trolley. With a click and a drag, you could view 360 degree panoramas of the inside of museum space. I guess the artwork of copyrighted stuff gets blurred. The maps contain GPS data from Google Collections, so whilst walking around a panorama you could click on an object and get its database record.

Google Object Search – Simple really. Get Google’s powerful search engine onto museum collections. This is just because too many museum collection search engines are just not good enough. How useful would it be to find museum objects on a “loc:” or “type:” or accession numbers?

Picaseum - Just as a competitor to the amount of museum DIY on Flickr. Competition is good and Flickr isn’t helping them much. Something a bit more tasked to help and with more features to open up museums’ photographic collections.

There’s probably a lot more suggestions.