Sunday, November 27, 2011

Our Path to Education: The American Association of University Women Online Museum

Right now in the United States, women make up 57% of enrolled undergraduate college students.  Feminists and other advocates for women's education rightly applaud this achievement, but how did it come to be less than a century after women received the right to vote?  You can find some answers to this question at the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Online Museum.



The AAUW, which was founded in 1881, works to provide equity for women in all areas of life, especially education.  Their actions during the past 130 years are spelled out in great detail in Our History, interspersed with many good-quality images.  There's a lot of good information in this section, but the way it's presented - as a series of timelines to scroll through - is not the most appealing.

Three other sections - Advocacy and Action; Scholarship and Support; and Research and Publications - also speak to the organization's history and are presented in similar formats (though Research and Publications goes beyond this static layout by letting you download some of AAUW's early, out-of-print literature).  Combining these galleries with the Our History section to make one all-encompassing interactive exhibit would make for a much more comprehensive and interesting historical portrait.



There's also the Portrait Gallery of famous AAUW members and the Outlook Gallery, which features images of past issues of the organization's journal.  The Portrait Gallery is worth checking out to see who has been a member of AAUW, but I wish there was more information on these women's accomplishments.  The Outlook Gallery isn't very helpful at all because it only shows AAUW Outlook covers.  It would be much more useful to be able to look inside the magazine, or at least read some of the articles.



By far the most interesting section in the museum is the Buildings Gallery, which showcases the past and present headquarters of the AAUW.  You can view artifacts and images of different rooms in these buildings, and you can even take a Flash tour of the organization's first headquarters.

This last exhibit is the kind of presentation that would most benefit the wealth of information presented here.  There's so much history and literature contained in the AAUW's existence that it needs to be synthesized and presented in an engaging way that's more accessible and less like a textbook.  I have high hopes that this organization, which has thrived for well over a century, can spruce up its virtual museum and become more visitor-friendly.


The American Association of University Women Online Museum
Mission:  Through the AAUW Online Museum, AAUW is pleased to share our rich history as a leader in promoting equity for women and girls for more than 125 years.
Website:  svc.aauw.org/museum

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Sink-sational: The Online Titanic Museum

If you're like me, you're excited for next year's 3D re-release of James Cameron's Titanic (not because the movie is any good, but because I want to see that ship crack in half in lifelike detail).  The movie premiers in just five months, so in the meantime you may want to brush up on your Titanic history.  For a shallow immersion into this ship's iconography, check out the Online Titanic Museum.



Built around a private collection of Titanic memorabilia, this museum features four exhibits of objects.  The Unsinkable Titanic shows advertisements for the ship and images of some of its furnishings.  Disaster Strikes is a gallery of newspaper articles and postmortem commemorative books and sheet music (and you can even listen to some snippets of song).  White Star Line displays artifacts with the White Star Line insignia, which were on board the Titanic and its sister ships Olympic and Brittanic.  Finally, the gallery simply named Related Items is a mishmash of images that couldn't be slotted in elsewhere.

The images are of pretty good quality, and there is plenty of information given for each object.  I was also impressed that this museum decided to display not just historical photographs and newspapers, but also White Star Line promotional materials and artifacts recovered from the ship.  These really help in conveying the excitement surrounding Titanic's maiden voyage, and show how passengers were living on board the ship in the days and hours before it sank.



I'm a little disappointed, however, that there's not more information on how this museum came to be.  The museum's home page states that it's built from a personal collection, but whose collection is it?  Does it belong to an institution or an individual?  Why did this person or place start collecting, and what is their interest in Titanic history?  Knowing these things would help to better evaluate how trustworthy the objects and their interpretations are, yet this information is unavailable.



Still, it is interesting to be able to look at chair slats and upholstery and White Star Line china that are almost a hundred years old and have (in some cases) been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for a few decades.  I'm sure most of us approach the history of the Titanic with more than a little morbid curiosity.  This museum - featuring furniture and postcards that were handled by people who didn't know they would be dead in a matter of days - helps satisfy that curiosity.

The Online Titanic Museum
Mission:  The online Titanic Museum is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Titanic; her twin sisters Olympic and Brittanic and the White Star Line - the shipping line that owned and operated the three "Olympic Class" steamers.
Website:  www.onlinetitanicmuseum.com

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Art Without End: Olga's Gallery

Have you ever had a painting spring to mind that you know you learned about somewhere, but now you can't remember what it's called or who created it?  You can only recall a few details - it was from the Rococo period and there was a slipper and a swing involved - and it's driving you crazy.  But there's an easy way to solve this dilemma:  visit Olga's Gallery, type in a few keywords, and soon you'll find out that you're thinking of is The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.






Olga's Gallery claims to be one of the largest online art collections, and it's probably true.  You can search for pieces by artist, movement or country of origin.  You can even do a search by subject - so if you wanted to look up Prince Albert, you could find portraits by both British and German artists.  Olga's Gallery also provides a helpful index of which pieces are recent additions to the gallery.


But this museum is more than just images - it provides a wealth of information about each artist and most of their works.  Besides listing the year, medium, size and location of each image, Olga's Gallery also includes a detailed description of subject matter of many pieces.  And if you're confused about what is being referred to, just hop back to the homepage.  There you can find sections that explain Greek and Roman myths, stories about the saints, notes about the Bible and other religious traditions, and summaries of literature from around the world.  And if you want to delve even deeper into art history, you can read the archived newsletters that Olga's Gallery used to send out.






With so many images and resources available at your fingertips, Olga's Gallery would seem to be an art lover's paradise.  I do appreciate having so much information and history all in one place, but the website is marred by tons of ads.  There are Google ads off the side and embedded in the text; there are huge block ads that you have to scroll past to see the pieces; and there are those devilish pop-under ads that spring up every so often.  Be prepared with deal with these annoyances before you visit.


But do visit.  There's so much available to look at and learn, and you could spend hours jumping from one subject or artist to the next.  Sure, it's grating to find ads everywhere, but if that's the price to pay for having thousands of years of art right in from of you, so be it.


Olga's Gallery
Website:  www.abcgallery.com 

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Past Sales: The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design isn't entirely virtual.  It has a physical space in Milwaukee that houses a collection, but it also has a series of digital exhibits featuring online-only content.  It's this component of the Eisner that I'll explore.

There are five virtual exhibits featured on the Eisner's website, all dealing with different methods and genres of advertisement.  Be sure to check them all out:



Hikifuda looks at how Japanese illustrated advertisements were developed and changed over time.  The content is engaging, especially since marketing historians often ignore non-Western influences, and the images are high quality.  The exhibit is a little static, however, and you have to navigate through some annoying music.

The exhibit on Boris Artzybasheff looks at how this Russian illustrator contributed to both advertising and magazine deisgn.  There's plenty of good interpretation to be found, and the images are superb, but the presentation is not very interactive.

The Art of the Album Cover is much different from the previous two exhibits.  It's set up as if you were playing a record - in order to view album covers from different decades, you have to move a turntable arm around.  While viewing these covers you can also listen to music from that era (or you can mute the sound).  My only complaint is that the quality of the album cover images isn't great.



The Power of Advertising:  Burma Shave tells the story of a clever marketing campaign from the 1920s. In order to understand just what the makers of Burma Shave were trying to accomplish, this exhibit lets you listen to audio clips, view images of roadside signs and see the product's old packaging.  And if you linger on the main screen long enough, you'll be able to cycle through the rhyming jingles that formed the backbone of these ads.

The final exhibit is A New Set of Wheels, which shows how car advertisements evolved and adapted to different media.  Using interactive timelines, you can see how cars changed through the years and how they were presented in prints ads.  You can also view a few TV spots for the Volkswagen Beetle, and you can play around with 3D images of a few classic cars.  There's such a wealth of information and images that you could easily loose track of time while marveling over old cars.



I would definitely recommend taking the time to view all these exhibits.  Their subject matter is incredibly diverse, yet taken together they provide an interesting narrative of the history of advertising.  Despite some limitations, you can learn a lot, and if you're in the Milwaukee area you should check out the Eisner's physical counterpart.

The Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design
Mission:  The Eisner is an interactive educational center focusing on advertising and design, and their impact on our culture:  honor and lend recognition to past achievements within the scope of advertising and design; foster public awareness of the influential role of advertising and design on society; serve as an educational resource for advertising and design students and professionals and the community at large.  With its unique emphasis on the social, historical and aesthetic implications of advertising and design, the Eisner museum is an important center for research on and discussion of advertising and design.
Website:  www.eisnermuseum.org/exhibits/online.shtm