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