October has been the busiest month in Mooseum's life so far. The biggest news is something to keep: a passport of every museum you've been to. There's also a new homepage, faster pages, more museums in 3D, directions inside buildings and guides to over 400 cities. Here's what's new.
Your museum passport
Every museum page now has an I've been here button. Tap it and the museum's ink stamp lands in your museum passport, dated today. You'll find the same button on the museum cards at the end of our blog posts.
You don't need an account. Your stamps stay on your phone or computer until you create a free account, and then they move into it, so they're safe on every device.
Been to a lot of museums already? Where have you already been? lets you add past visits in one go. Pick from the world's best-known museums, look up museums near a city, or search, and add the year if you remember it.
Stamps earn gold seals: Double feature for two museums in one day, Welcome back for a return visit, Border crosser for museums in three countries, and more up to Collector at 50 museums. Your passport page turns into a little book you can open and page through, with every museum, country and city you've stamped, and a map of them all.
Your passport is private. If you make your profile public, it shows there too, and you can share it with a link.
A new homepage
The homepage now puts the two ways in up front: search for a museum, or start your passport. Shortcuts like Near me, the Louvre and the British Museum are one tap away. Further down, four cards lead to the world map, city guides, indoor maps and audio tours, and the FAQ answers the questions people ask most.
Faster pages
Mooseum now runs on Cloudflare's network, so pages are served from somewhere near you instead of one far-away server. Museum pages, city guides and blog posts open faster as a result.
See the museum before you go
Zoom in on the explore map and 58 of the world's best-known museums rise out of the map in 3D, from the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum to the Prado, the Vasa Museum and the Grand Egyptian Museum. Tilt and turn the map to see the building from any side, so you know which entrance you're walking to.
Museums on the map also look the same everywhere now. Ones with an indoor map or an audio tour get a yellow ring and a small badge, so they stand out.
Find your way inside
For museums with an indoor map, the map is now one continuous map: keep zooming in on the building and it fades into its floor plan, with a floor picker. Search for a gallery or a café, tap Directions, and follow the steps from the entrance, including which lift or stairs to take between floors. Turn on Step-free route if you're with a pushchair or a wheelchair, and use Share to send a friend the exact room you're in. Try it at the Royal Ontario Museum.
Plan a museum day in any city
Every city with at least five museums has its own guide, over 400 of them. Try London, Paris, New York or Tokyo. Each guide lists the museums starting with the most visited, and where we have the information, shows whether a museum is free and whether it's open today.
Museum pages now show the street address with a Get directions link, and the page title names the city, so it's easier to tell the right museum apart in search results.
Audio tours
Every audio tour now has its own page. You can read through the stops before you go, grouped by floor and room. Take a look at Change is in the air at the Natural History Museum of Helsinki. Listening is free with an account.
Know a museum well? Tour Studio helps you turn that into a tour, and it now narrates it too:
- Pick a narrator from a shortlist of natural-sounding voices, and hear the opening of a stop before you narrate the whole thing.
- Teach it names. Add the ones the narrator gets wrong, with how they should sound.
- Snap a stop. In the museum, photograph an object's label and Studio reads the title, maker and date for you, so building a tour on the spot is quick.
Emails you choose
New accounts get one welcome email. Everything else is up to you: in the email settings on your profile you can pick Letters from Moosy (a monthly letter with a museum story, picks and an audio tour), news about your museum passport, and Near you, about new museums and tours close to home. Nothing is chosen for you, we send at most one of these a week, and every one has an unsubscribe link that works without signing in. The details are in our privacy policy.
From the blog
If you read one thing this month, make it the story of the eccentric heir who built a museum of 4,000 stuffed animals: Walter Rothschild, his zebra carriage and the free Natural History Museum at Tring.
Work at a museum?
We'd love to hear from you, whether you want to fix something on your museum's page or talk about an indoor map, a 3D model or an audio tour. Write to museums@mooseum.app and it comes straight to us.
Find a museum, stamp the ones you've been to, and tell me what you'd like next. Mooseum is shaped by what museum-goers actually need.