Sunday, October 30, 2011

All Wrapped Up: The American Package Museum

Do you ever get a nostalgic feeling when you see a product logo that's been out of date for years?  It brings back memories from your childhood, maybe, or from some memorable time in your past, and you start to feel wistful for the era when that logo was new and fresh.  Well, get ready to take a long and winding trip down memory lane with the American Package Museum.

The opening page of the American Package Museum is pretty alluring.  You're greeted with short explanation about the museum, written by curator Ian House, alongside a group of three retro Wrigley's wrappers placed on a 60s-era tablecloth.  Click anywhere on this screen and you'll be taken to the museum's exhibits.



You have two options for viewing the exhibits:  You can either watch them in a slideshow (which is the default view after clicking through the opening screen) or you can choose what to view from an alphabetical index of products.  I would definitely check out the index instead of the slideshow because the index tells you which objects can be viewed in 3D.  You've got to have a pretty good connection to see the 3D objects, and they take a little while to load, but the wait is worth it.  How many other places can show you a full rotation of the original Oh Henry! packaging?

Despite these cool features, the American Package Museum isn't perfect.  The links for the Guestbook and Giftshop don't work, and the Contact section is similarly missing.  Also, none of the exhibits have any interpretation besides a caption with each product's name, which is disappointing if you want to know just how old each package is.

Nevertheless, the American Package Museum is pretty interesting in a visual sense.  If you just want to marvel at 20th century marketing, this is the place to go.  But if you want to learn the stories behind each product and packaging, you're going to have to do some research on your own.

The American Package Museum
Mission:  The primary objective of this website is to preserve and display specimens of American package design from the early decades of the 20th century.  The secondary objective is to establish a community for those interested in such an endeavor.
Website:  www.packagemuseum.com

Sunday, October 23, 2011

History, eh: The Virtual Museum of Canada

Canada is a huge country - the second largest in the world - and many parts of it are sparsely inhabited.  How did museums in some of these far-flung regions manage to reach millions of visitors and share their resources around the world?  By setting up a virtual museum.

The Virtual Museum of Canada was created by the Canadian Heritage Information Network as a way to bring together more than 3,000 museums and historic sites across the country.  It currently hosts 790 virtual exhibits, comprising nearly a million images.  Many of these exhibits, like Prince Edward Island - Memories of WWII, relate to Canadian history and culture.  These exhibits tend to be a little dry, since they are presented as a series of photos and maps with catalog descriptions and minimal interpretation.



But don't be turned off by these history slide shows, because if you look hard there's more exciting exhibits to be seen.  The exhibits aren't Canada-specific - such as Anno Domini:  Jesus Through the Centuries - are much more interactive and engaging.  And if you visit the VMC Lab, you'll get to experience the latest virtual museum technology.  The Lab is a space to view some of the more digitally advanced exhibits that Canadian museums have put out.  At the Thule Whalebone House exhibit, for example, you can see a 3D rendering of the kind of house that First Nations people once lived in.

The Virtual Museum of Canada offers some other cool resources, like a podcast series on unusual topics in Canadian history and section called My VMC, where you can assemble your own personal exhibit space.  There's also Teachers' Centre (aww, Canadian spelling) that not only provides classroom resources, but also allows teachers to upload and share their lesson plans and projects.



So, if you're curious about Canada's history but don't want to spend the time and money traveling all over the Great Frozen North, check out the Virtual Museum of Canada.  You can see plenty historical photos and objects, and you can also use emerging technologies to explore places you might otherwise never visit.

The Virtual Museum of Canada
Mission:  As an endless source of discoveries, virtualmuseum.ca is a unique interactive space that brings together Canadian museum collections and riches in a variety of thought-provoking and instructive contents.  It's the window on current museum news and the reference guide to planning an outing.
Website:  www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/index-eng.jsp

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Let's Get Meta: The Museum of Online Museums

So how do you begin blogging about virtual museums?  Perhaps by going to the source:  The Museum of Online Museums.  Created in 1999 by Coudal Partners, a design and advertising firm based in Chicago, the Museum of Online Museums contains both a permanent collection and a changing exhibits gallery that is updated quarterly. 

The permanent collection is more of an aggregation project, pulling together the online archives from physical museums around the world as well as quirky personal collections that have been uploaded to the web.  Here you can link to the National Portrait Gallery’s website.  You can also find the website of The Grocery List Collection, one man’s quest to display all the grocery lists he’s ever found.

The changing exhibits gallery features archives of all kinds of ephemera that someone, at some point, found meaningful or important.  Past exhibits have included Small Town Noir, a collection of mugshots and crime stories from New Castle, Pennsylvania; MAD Cover Site, which displays the cover, index and price of every MAD Magazine issue every printed; and An Archive of Radio Shack Catalogs (pretty much self-explanatory).  This is just a small sampling of past exhibits – you could easily lose an afternoon trying to view all of the previously featured collections.



The current featured exhibit is The Curators, a three-part video that tracks down some of the people behind the permanent and changing exhibits.  Here we meet Bill Keaggy, founder of the aforementioned Grocery List Collection, and others who have become part of The Museum of Online Museums.  It’s an interesting look at what form online collecting takes offline.

The Museum of Online Museums seems a little like a stunt at first - like the design nerd equivalent of a snake eating its tail - but don't let that keep you away.  There are a fascinating number of collections to browse that you never thought you'd care about, and you may even be inspired to throw whatever it is you collect up on the web.


The Museum of Online Museums
Mission:  Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of the mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector.
Website:  coudal.com/moom

Sunday, October 9, 2011

What's going on here?

If you're stumbling across this blog and wondering just what this is all about, sit back and let me explain:

This blog is dedicated to exploring the world of digital museums - museums that exists only online, in digital format.  You may or not be aware of them, but there are many collections out there that don't have a physical form.  They live instead within the confines of URLs.

I got interested in digital museums from my work with Girl Museum, a digital museum that explores representations of girlhood through different eras and cultures.  The founder of Girl Museum lives in New Zealand, and those of us who contribute to the museum live in countries all across the world, yet we are all able to come together to create a collection that can be shared around the globe.  This would never be possible in a traditional museum!

So my aim here is to explore what can be found in the realm of digital museums - what kinds of collections are out there, what these museums are trying to say and how they are making an impact in the world.  Check back every week to learn about a new digital museum, and together we'll explore this new frontier.


PS. I can't take credit for this blog's title.  The phrase originated as the title of an article by Roger Silverstone.