Tate Online has grown significantly over the past biennium and is now visited by nearly four million unique visitors each year. Many of Tate's aims can be fulfilled through embracing new technology and finding ways to use it most effectively. Today, Tate Online is no longer simply a vehicle providing information for those preparing to visit the galleries. Instead, it generates its own projects and special content.

Almost all departments now contribute content and ideas and with the Interpretation and Education department, Tate Online appointed an E-Learning Curator in 2003. The first project from this collaboration, Tate Kids1, includes the popular interactive activity My Imaginary City2. This will shortly be followed by a dedicated section for schools.

Digital media provide many new ways of discovering and looking at art, and perhaps our most exciting recent project is i-Map3. Introduced at the time of Tate Modern's Matisse Picasso exhibition, it helps visually impaired visitors to explore the two artists' work. We have also launched our first online course, providing users with an introduction to modern art4. Tate's public programme of talks, symposia and live performances is enhanced by live webcasts which are then archived and can be viewed later at Online Events5.

Tate Online continues to extend access to the Tate Collection. The digitisation of over 60,000 works was completed two years ago and since then 4,000 objects from the Tate Archive and over 6,000 additional interpretation texts have been added. The site has also launched its first special imaging treatments6 which use new multimedia techniques to reveal different aspects of works by Frank Auerbach, Henry Moore and Rachel Whiteread.

Tate Online plays an important role in deepening and broadening knowledge beyond the Tate Collection. Turner Worldwide7, the first online catalogue of the complete works of JMW Turner, enables scholars and enthusiasts to explore the artist online far more comprehensively than before. It includes 2,500 works outside the Turner Bequest held at Tate and provides links to a wide range of other Turner collections and websites.

Research is at the heart of Tate programmes and making it public has become one of the site's priorities. We have recently added a Research8 section. Focusing on academic research, and with a new online journal called Tate Papers9, it reports on major projects and partnerships, with links to Tate's Library and Archive.

People planning a visit to a Tate gallery often go first to Tate Online for information and to book tickets and purchase Tate Membership10. Today, up to fifty percent of advance ticket sales for Tate's exhibitions and events are made online. We send out 50,000 monthly e-newsletters and we piloted multi- media messaging when we offered images to download as mobile phone wallpaper for the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at Tate Britain in 2003.

Online content is also available in the galleries themselves. A new touch-screen system allowed visitors to Tate Britain's Turner and Venice exhibition to view the artist's sketchbooks online while in the galleries. Kiosks in the interpretation area on Level 5 at Tate Modern provide information on works on display, and also promote the possibility of finding out more, later, from a home computer.

For those who cannot reach the galleries, Tate Online gives a vivid experience of current exhibitions and displays. Online footage of Tate Modern's Donald Judd exhibition, for instance, includes clips from an interview with curator Nicholas Serota and is regularly visited months after the show ended. Explore Tate Britain and Explore Tate Modern11 extend gallery displays to an international audience, while two new works commissioned for Net Art12 introduce new visitors directly to art. Tate Online has much to offer in its own right.

We are delighted that BT, Tate Online's first sponsor, renewed their sponsorship in April 2003 for a further three years. BT's support has enabled Tate Online to innovate, think differently and serve Tate's audiences better. In 2002 the site won both a prestigious BAFTA award for i-Map and the first ever London Tourism Award for Best Website. Then, in 2003, Tate Online was awarded a second BAFTA, for the Best Online Factual site.

Over the next two years we will continue to invest in and improve Tate Online, bringing more of our programmes to more people and deepening their experience of Tate.

Footnotes

1. www.tate.org.uk/learning/kids
2. www.tate.org.uk/learning/kids/city. Sponsored by Barclays PLC
3. www.tate.org.uk/imap
4. www.tate.org.uk/ita. Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Art is a collaboration with the New Opportunities Fund and the City Literary Institute. Online learning at Tate is linked to the National Grid for Learning (NgfL)
5. www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents
6. www.tate.org.uk/collections/in_special. Supported by the New Opportunities Fund NOF-digitise programme
7. www.tate.org.uk/turnerww. Supported by the New Opportunities Fund NOF-digitise programme
8. www.tate.org.uk/research
9. www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers
10. www.tate.org.uk/tickets and tate.org.uk/members
11. www.tate.org.uk/britain/explore and www.tate.org.uk/modern. Both developed in partnership with BT
12. www.tate.org.uk/netart. New additions are agoraXchange 2003 by Natalie Bookchin and Jacqueline Stevens, and Blessed Bandwidth 2003 by Shilpa Gupta. Both works were made with financial assistance from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology

In 2003 Tate Online was awarded the BAFTA for the Best Online Factual site