Interactive Museum Websites and Online Exhibits

Today our lab assignment was to check out some interactive museum websites and online exhibits in class. I looked at one of the websites listed as well as a few websites of museums I had actually been to. The purpose for doing the latter was that I felt that comparing the online aspects of the museums to what I knew about the insides of the actual museums would be helpful in assessing the pros and cons of the use of the internet in the display of information and objects for museums.
The sites I visited included:
http://nanozone.org
http://www.smm.org/explore
http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/imaging/index.html
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/exhibits/online_interactive.htm

Let me preface this by saying that during our class discussion today the thought on my mind, which we touched on briefly, is that there is no way seeing a picture of something on a website is as powerful as seeing it in real life. That led me to wonder about the effects of interactive websites and online exhibits for museums on people's ideas of the importance of museums themselves as well as the specific objects they contain. It seemed to me that by simply showing the public a picture of something, you take away much of its emotional and intellectual value, making it appear less interesting or pertinent to one's own life and experience, lessening its perceived importance. This could be disastrous in terms of adequately educating future generations, and finding funding for museums around the world, as well as for the fields of study which contribute to the findings of museums.

While I still think that this holds true to some extent, what I saw on the websites I visited changed my mind at least in part. It seemed to me that the designers of the sites had included some really excellent and thought provoking teaching tools in the pages they built. One of the things I enjoyed the most was the ability to show the audience/page viewer/reader/whatever where the artifacts in the museum had come from. By this I mean that if a skeleton or piece of pottery had come from an ancient city that had been dug up 20 years ago, the website offered numerous photographs and maps of the digging site. This is something that is often missed by going to an actual museum, and it allows you to really feel a sense of reverence toward an object if you are able to see the amazing place it came from.

In addition, many of these websites' interactive sections are very effective in showing how and why things work the way that they do. On the Science Museum of Minnesota's website, you can learn how animals make the sounds that they do, for instance. In some museums, an object is presented and it is explained who made it and for what purpose, but it is at times difficult to get a sense of how it was made and what it was used for on a daily basis. For this reason I was pretty excited to find description of such things on the websites I visited.

Ok, I'll stop rambling and get down to business. So, on the nanozone website, I found that animation and audio were the two main media tools utilized in at least the sections I explored. The site was very geared towards children, which I sort of approved of because it means that they are trying to get kids interested in science and museums and other cool stuff. I'm not sure I fully understand what a plug-in is, so I can't really answer the question of whether it required one or not.

On the second site I visited, the Science Museum of Minnesota's website, the interactive page had several different little areas you could explore, some more interesting and well-developed than others. In general, this website utilized games as teaching tools as well as photographs, videos, and an entire audio section. I found the audio section to be fairly interesting, as well as a small section in which a "comic book" was made to portray the events leading up to the uncovering of some ancient bones in Turkey. Some of the photographs in the other sections were a little bland and impersonal, which I thought sort of detracted from the site.

The two Chicago museums whose pages I visited were the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. Both sites relied primarily on photographs and videos as their major forms of media. These sites' interactive sections seemed as though they could be geared towards people of any age, and I enjoyed that flexibility.

And that's all!