All museums do this; it's an understandable inability to relinquish control. If they actually just wanted people to have access to the images, they could just make a torrent. They would spring up on 100 different sites in at least 4 different ways (modern internet, you know), and people with a deeper interest could download the lot and examine them in their viewers of choice at their leisure.
People would also completely forget the source, and the museum would get very little credit for the effort put into digitizing them. Sharing this data is not naturally profitable and can't be made profitable without some form of DRM, and a terrible interface is de facto DRM. This is a typical place where the state should intervene, where huge value for the many (the sum of small value for hundreds of millions of people) is sadly outweighed by infinitesimal costs to a few (the sum of the massive labor of half a dozen people.)
People would also completely forget the source, and the museum would get very little credit for the effort put into digitizing them. Sharing this data is not naturally profitable and can't be made profitable without some form of DRM, and a terrible interface is de facto DRM. This is a typical place where the state should intervene, where huge value for the many (the sum of small value for hundreds of millions of people) is sadly outweighed by infinitesimal costs to a few (the sum of the massive labor of half a dozen people.)