In 2009, The BBC joined forces with the British Museum to launch the landmark series on BBC Radio 4 called ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, a global story told through the British Museum’s unparalleled world collection.
We decided we wanted to create a digital experience that would mirror any physical museum. Designed as an immersive website with intuitive time-based navigation, ‘A History of the World’ uses explorative technologies like Deep Zoom to send users on a creative voyage through history.
More than 59,000 unique users per week visit the A History of the World website, spending on-average 11 minutes on the site with 40% of the objects featured on the website being contributed by our audience.
New Media Age ranked the AHOW site as “website of the week” shortly after launch, and the Guardian was also impressed with the site:
"Even more ambitious than the radio series itself [the website] encourages users to submit items of their own for a place in world history, along with much interactive content, detailed information on all the objects featured in the radio programmes and links to 350 other museum collections across the UK.”