Birthplace of a Nation: The Mount Vernon Online Museum

George Washington, as the first president of the United States, has wormed his way into many different facets of our lives.  Besides his role in the founding of our nation, we all learned the apocryphal story of the cherry tree as children.  I remember a jump rope chant and an alternate version of the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" that made use of his name, and I'm sure there are many other references to this Founding Father out there.  Now George Washington and his home have found a place on the internet, in the form of the Mount Vernon Online Museum.

Mount Vernon was the Washington family's estate in Virginia, and for over a hundred years it has operated as a historic house open for visitors.  It's pretty unusual for a historic house to have a strong online presence (mainly because these museums are often small and poorly funded), but since Mount Vernon is so well-known and heavily visited I suppose an online museum was the logical next step.  Currently there are four exhibits:  The Making of a Military Man, Setting George Washington's Table, Rereading Washington Through His Library, and a section about excavation at Mount Vernon.

Each of these exhibits is accompanied by five images of artifacts in the Mount Vernon collection, which are well-labeled and explained with just the right amount of information.  I like that the exhibits tackle somewhat unusual subjects, and not just the typical military-and-politics parts of Washington's life.  It lets us see some day-to-day aspects of this great man's life, and by showing some but not all of Mount Vernon's collection, it becomes a great selling point for the physical museum.

Beyond the images and the topics, though, I'm not terribly impressed with these exhibits.  The main content is long paragraphs set in a small text box, which you have to scroll and click through to read in their entirety.  This reminded me overly detailed Wikipedia pages and made me skim through the information instead of reading and trying to connect it with the objects.  In a physical exhibit I imagine that this text would be spread out throughout a gallery, making it more palatable, but having it all scrunched into one place online isn't really user-friendly.

Hopefully this is just the starting point for Mount Vernon.  I imagine that as their online capacity grows, they'll learn what works online and what doesn't and apply that to make their virtual content even better. I would love to see more objects and have the exhibits based around them instead of around text.  There's got to be so much contained within Mount Vernon that could be shared online, and I hope to be able to check back at a later date and see what new things the museum has for us to explore.


The Mount Vernon Online Museum
Website:  www.mountvernon.org/pre-exhibits