This week we published Museum in a Tab, a Google Chrome extension which displays a different item from the Science Museum Group Collection in each newly opened tab.
The extension showcases hundreds of thousands of items from our astonishing collection and includes new photographs published as part of an ambitious project to reveal more of the collection.
It can be a struggle to discover ordinary, surprising or wondrous items from our collection so we hope this new extension enables you to explore more easily.
Visit the Chrome Web Store to try it for yourself.
Museum in a Tab was created by the Group’s Digital Lab, which explores new ways for audiences to engage with the collection.
It was inspired by Google Chrome extensions which show random items from collections such as Meow Met, which displays cats from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Up Your Tab which features artworks from Europeana.
Museum in a Tab uses our collection API to display images and data from collection items selected at random, building on the code used in the Random Object Generator we created in 2018.
You can share the item featured in each new tab via social media or click through to discover more through our online collection.
We built this extension for Google Chrome as it is the world’s most popular web browser, accounting for 60% of web traffic across the globe.
However if you use Firefox or Safari you can also use this extension in your browser, just set your homepage to this webpage.
We’ve released the open code for this extension on the Science Museum Group’s GitHub page so anyone can freely build on it to create something new.
