World's top museums open doors on Twitter with #MuseumWeek

The Louvre, New York's MoMA, the National Gallery of Australia, the Tokyo National Museum, Shakespeare's Globe in Britain and more than 1,400 other museums around the world are coming to Twitter next week.

From Monday, art institutions in 50 countries will be tweeting under the hashtag #MuseumWeek to publicise their collections and to highlight reactions, the US-based social network said in a statement.

French museum officials backed by Twitter and the French culture ministry are steering the week-long event, which seeks to engage with Twitter users worldwide.

#MuseumWeek will show users the behind-the-scenes work that goes on in museums, and visitors' snaps and accounts.

The project is also inviting artists to send in pictures of their own work.

All the interactions will be recorded and stored away in a "time capsule" at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie museum in Paris until 2035, as a snapshot for "future generations," Twitter said.

Next week's event is a much-bigger second round of an initiative launched last year, in which 630 European museums took part.

More details are available on the multilingual website museumweek2015.org.

© 2015 AFP