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