The SepiaTown Blog: Powerhouse Museum's Virtual Tour of Old Sydney

Move over NYC, we've got a new crown jewel in our bonnet – introducing Sydney, Australia on SepiaTown!

This summer we partnered with Seb Chan of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum (Australia's largest museum) to do our first mass-upload of images from a contributing cultural institution. The results are really fantastic. The Powerhouse's 500 quality historic images of the Sydney metro area and NSW combined with the unique SepiaTown platform have created a massively populated, brand new virtual tour of Sydney at the turn of the 19th century.

We are especially proud to have The Powerhouse Museum be our first mass-uploader; with this approach, they're blazing a digital trail that we hope other institutions will be inspired to follow. For those unfamiliar with the Powerhouse Museum: They are one of the foremost world-class cultural institutions using the latest technology and progressive web-ethics to share their collection in increasingly open, interactive, and interesting ways. Among their accomplishments:

They were the first museum to geo-code a substantial piece of their photo-archive.

They presented on their website one of the earliest (if not the very earliest) Google Maps mashups of historical photographs.

They were an early uploader to Flickr Commons, and an early adopter of Layar.

And, in the last month, they have joined a tiny group of pioneering museums that have released their own API -- granting developers true open access to their collection, and ensuring some really neat stuff will be made with it in the coming months and years.