Van Gogh's Letters. Or how to make the results of 15 years of research widely accessible for various audiences and how to involve them?

In October 2009, as the culmination of 15 years of academic research, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) presented a prestigious new academic publication of the complete correspondence of Vincent van Gogh, both in book form and as a Web edition. Based on a cross-media strategy and a mixture of new media, including a blog, an iPhone app and a multimedia tour, the collection of letters was made permanently accessible to a wide audience. This paper addresses the underlying principles and the choices made as well as the organisational and technical challenges faced, and discusses the results so far and the lessons learned from our experiences.