The British Museum Images

http://www.bmimages.com/Index.asp
“The British Museum is the authoritative source of images depicting would culture and history including ceramics, sculpture, prints, drawings and paintings.”
British Museum Images is the on-line digital image website of the British Museum offering images of objects held in the British Museum’s collection. All of the images are rights-managed; users can search, buy, license and download 300 dpi JEPG digital images for educational use. 72 dpi JEPG un-watermarked digital images are accessible at no extra cost. The British Museum does not supply transparent or print format images for commercial use.
Currently, there are 9 collections on-line. Users could search the collection by keyword or image number or randomly browse the collection. All the images are represented through thumbnails with image numbers. By clicking the thumbnail, a pop out window with detailed metadata descriptive information including name, date, original country, brief history will show up.
British Museum Images is just a simple image database. I don’t think it is of equivalent reputation as British Museum. However, for research or educational purposes, it seems that there is enough information on it. What I concern is how could a database be enriched but not limited in simple searching as well as representing the images.