Victoria Memorial will soon launch a website that will be devoid of the " sarkari look and tone" of the present portal and will be rich in information about the museum and its activities.

"The new website, developed by Webel and is likely to be launched in mid-July, will aim to draw more viewers to the museum by providing an exciting introduction to it and outlining its special activities," said Memorial secretary and curator Jayanta Sengupta.

The hallmarks of the current website are the use of convoluted language, which is typical of government communications, and an abundance of notices related to tenders and vacancies.

People looking for such notices, Sengupta pointed out, can easily find them on the website but the portal's primary objective is to draw more viewers to the museum.

"The basic architecture and creative designing is done. Most of the images - over 1,000 of them - have been uploaded. We only need to work on the text and some other features like e-ticketing for foreign tourists and embedded links," Sengupta said.

With the Royal Gallery of the Memorial closed for renovation for over 14 years, Sengupta feels the website would be a good way to present the "core collection of the museum", such as colonial drawings, paintings, aquatints and lithographs, which tried to capture India before the invention of the camera in 1850.

The new website will host larger and clearer images than the existing one. "The present portal has a small snap of Russian artist Vasily Vereshchagin's The Elephant Procession, an 1876 painting of Prince of Wales Edward VII's state entry into Jaipur, the third largest oil painting of the world. The new site will have a much better image of the painting," a Memorial official said.

Selections from the huge collection of paintings taken on unlimited loan from Rabindra Bharati University will also be seen on the website.

The official website ( www.victoriamemorial-cal.org/) will have links to the Memorial's exhibitions on Google Cultural Institute https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/partner/victoria-memorial-hall and the culture ministry's website www.museumsofindia.gov.in

Publications, e-catalogues and high-resolution images for research scholars will be available on the site. And along with the 360-degree panoramic view of the interiors, 360-degree views of the campus from various vantage points will be available, too.