About Youseum
Youseum makes free self-guided tours of places worth understanding: city centers, college campuses, national parks, historic sites, museums and zoos, scenic drives and cruise ports. A tour runs in your phone's web browser. There is no app to install, no account and no ticket. You walk (or drive) the route at your own pace, and each stop tells you what you're looking at and why it matters.
The name is a play on "museum": the idea is to turn any interesting place into a museum you can walk through, with the labels, the stories and the curator's notes on your phone, and with you deciding where to linger and where to dig deeper.
How a Youseum® tour works
- A route and its stops. Each tour opens on a welcome page with a map of the route, practical notes for planning your visit, and the list of stops. Next and Prev follow the main route.
- Go deeper only where you want to. Many stops have optional deeper pages, reached with More here, for the building next door, the person behind the name or the rest of the story. Skip them and the tour stays short.
- Read or listen. Most tours are narrated, so you can keep your phone in your pocket and listen as you walk: tap Listen at the top of a stop, or turn on headphone mode in the menu and each page plays as you open it.
- Let your location help. If you allow it, the tour shows where you are on the map and opens the next stop when you arrive. Your location stays on your phone (see the privacy policy).
- Weak signal? Use Save this tour on the welcome page before you go, and the pages, photos and narration stay on your phone.
Who runs Youseum
Youseum is an independent project created and run by Scott Lincke in San Carlos, California. The idea came on a visit to Fort Funston, on the cliffs south of San Francisco: there was plenty to see, and no easy way to learn about the place and the interesting things in it. Youseum is meant to be that easy way, written by people who care about a place and want to share it with others.
The first tours, starting in 2021, covered places Scott had explored himself, such as the Indiana University campus and Garden of the Gods in Colorado. Today the site has about 100 tours across the United States and in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Colombia, Asia and Australia. Youseum® is a registered trademark in the United States.
How the tours are made
- Anyone can create a tour. Tours can be created by anyone who knows and cares about a place, such as a local, a guide, a student, or the staff of a museum, college or other venue. If you'd like to create a Youseum® tour, contact us for an editor account.
- People and AI, working together. Many of the tours on the site were researched, written and checked by a combination of people and AI tools, drawing on published sources: park, campus, museum and city histories, historical society and preservation records, and encyclopedia articles. Pages link to further reading so you can check a fact or keep going.
- Written for the place, on the spot. Every page is written to be read while standing in front of the thing it describes: where to look, what you're seeing, what happened here, and how to get to the next stop. Each tour's welcome page says how long the route is, how much time to allow, where to start (with directions) and whether the place charges admission.
- Photos with credit. Photos are our own or come from open-license and public-domain collections, credited on the page and listed on the photo credits page.
- Tell us what's missing or wrong. Every tour page has a "Was this helpful?" box where you can flag missing or incorrect information, or something that has changed, such as a closed building or a new opening time. You can also contact us. We fix errors as soon as we can.
Official tours for museums, colleges and other venues
Some tours are run with the place they cover. A museum, college or attraction can make Youseum its official self-guided tour: its own staff can edit the pages, the tour carries its name and links, and it has no ads. Learn about official tours and sponsorship.
How Youseum is paid for
The tours are free to use. Youseum is paid for by advertising on tour pages, by sponsors who support a tour, and by venues that run official tours, with additional funding provided by Scott Lincke. Ads never appear on official venue tours or sponsored tours.
Get in touch
Suggestions for a place that deserves a tour, corrections, partnership questions and press inquiries are all welcome on the contact page.