NEW YORK, N.Y.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) announced that it is collaborating with Google to allow users to search the Web via pictures they take on their mobile phones, to increase access to information online about its encyclopedic collections. Beginning this week, image-based searches on Google Goggles for works of art in the Met’s collections—whether from reproductions in books, posters, or postcards, for example, or in the galleries themselves—will produce direct links to extensive information about works of art on www.metmuseum.org, the Museum’s website. More than 76,000 works of art from the Met’s collections are currently recognizable when searching with Google Goggles, including works from the Museum’s significant holdings of American art, Asian art, photographs, drawings and prints, European paintings, and Islamic art. Sculptures and other objects that Google’s technology is not optimized to recognize were not included in the Met’s participation; the Museum also excluded works under copyright.