Sunday, August 26, 2012

Ancient Artifacts: The Penn Museum Online Exhibits

The Penn Museum, which is a part of the University of Pennsylvania's campus, is one of those dusty old museums that contain some really interesting hidden gems.  How much you enjoy the museum depends on your level of patience - are you willing to shuffle through display cases that haven't changed much in fifty years?  If not, you might dismiss this as just another dry scholar's museum.  But if you do take the time to look closely at everything, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.  The museum is now trying to show the world how interesting it can be through a few online exhibits, though I'm not sure how well they're succeeding.

There are ten exhibits you can browse on the Penn Museum's website, but for some reason the presentation of these exhibits isn't at all consistent.  The best allow for 3D viewing of objects in the collection and the exhibit halls they reside in.  Some also have interactive maps showing where University of Pennsylvania teams unearthed featured artifacts.  And some do a good job of linking the objects shown in these exhibits to the content of the physical museum's permanent displays.

But these positive aspects really only hold true for three exhibits:  The Real Story of the Ancient Olympic Games, The Ancient Greek World, and Egypt:  A New Look at an Ancient Culture.  The other seven exhibits leave something to be desired.  They tend to be long-winded, featuring long blocks of text interrupted only by a sparse few images.  Some take a rather too familiar tone, using a voice that seems much too casual and colloquial for exhibit content.  And one exhibit, The Real Me:  Therapeutic Narrative in Cosmetic Surgery, read like a very long Vanity Fair article slapped up on the web in a tiny blue font.

Over all, the online exhibits are pretty disappointing.  Compared to other physical museums that put content on their website, the Penn Museum is sorely lacking.  It seems strange that such a well-respected museum would neglect consistency and the curatorial voice, not to mention an element of enjoyability, in their online museum presence.  I do hope they get around to sprucing up this content, and soon, or they risk coming off as just another stuffy university museum.


The Penn Museum Online Exhibitions
Website:  www.penn.museum/online-exhibits.html

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Remembrance: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Online Exhibitions

That most of us have learned about the Holocaust, in school and through our families and possibly our religious institutions, is testament is how hard we have worked to ensure that the horrors of this mass persecution aren't ever repeated.  By teaching each other about this tragedy and the awful acts that were committed, we hope to make such violence and prejudice repellent.  That's the aim of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and now through its online exhibits anyone can learn, in depth, the many different aspects of this genocide.

The Holocaust usually conjures up images of Jews being persecuted, which was its primary intention - but it's easy to forget that there were many other facets of the German rise to power.  The Holocaust Museum's multitude of online exhibits cover, basically, everything.  Want to know about the 1936 Berlin Olympics?  There's a huge exhibit about that event.  Curious about survivors who continued their lives in the United States?  You can view many oral histories about this migration.  You can also learn about religious leaders who opposed the German government, Nazi propaganda and Holocaust denial.

Some of these exhibits are highly detailed - the one about the Olympics, for example, goes on for pages and covers just about everything you could possibly think of.  Some are just a few short paragraphs, like the page about people of African descent in Nazi Germany.  This inconsistency is a little annoying, because you don't know if you're going to get a avalanche of information and photos or just a few bits of information.  I was also frustrated by the setup of the online exhibitions, because if you got caught down the rabbit hole of a particularly detailed exhibit, it was difficult to get back to the main page displaying all of the exhibits.

But the online exhibits do plenty of things incredibly well.  There are a wealth of images, video, and oral histories to browse through.  The museum also lets you browse its ID program (which presents photos and histories of specific concentration camp victims) online.  Plus, the shear number of topics is really amazing because it reminds you just how devastating the Holocaust was to so many groups of people.  It's this type of presentation and remembrance that helps us keep in mind how devastating this period in history was, and why we should never forget it.


The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Online Exhibits
Website:  www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online




Sunday, August 12, 2012

Almost There: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Panoramic Virtual Tour

The Smithsonian museum system is, in my opinion, one of America's national treasures.  Comprising nineteen separate institutions plus a zoo and nine research centers, its collections are magnificent and highly varied.  And because it's run by the federal government, you can visit any part of it for free.  But if you've never made the trek to Washington, DC (or if you went there but somehow managed to not go to any part of the Smithsonian), you might never get a chance to see any of this.  But fear not, because the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) now has a virtual tour you can access from the comfort of your own home.

The NMNH's tour is pretty impressive.  You start in the building's rotunda and are treated to a lifelike 3D panoramic view of what's inside.  From there you can move around to all the exhibits - nineteen in total - via hotspots marked as arrows.  Clicking these arrows will take you from one gallery to the next, and in each section you can zoom in or out, rotate, and move up or down.  Galleries can also be accessed on a map in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, where the hotspots are labeled and clickable.

This setup is fascinating, because it really is the next best thing to actually being there.  The dioramas, the artifacts, the taxidermied animals - each of them is right in front of you in all their magnificence.  At some of the exhibits, you can even click on a camera symbol to get a close-up view of a particular specimen.  And since this is a virtual tour, you can spend as long as you like looking at everything, without the crowds and noise of a real museum.  The NMNH has even put several past exhibits online, plus a few views of the museum's grounds.

The only thing I found frustrating was the lack of interpretation on the tour.  In theory, you could zoom in on any of the information panels in the gallery until they were legible.  But in reality, only about half the panels were photographed in a resolution that allowed you to read them.  And those that are clear enough to make out distinct words can be difficult to view - you have to navigate precisely, so that the text comes into your field of vision, and you can easily bypass them if you don't look hard enough.

It would be nice to have information about what's in the galleries readily available - that would probably make this virtual tour perfect.  But even though that's not currently available, I still have to recommend the NMNH's panoramic tour as one of the best virtual museum projects I've seen.  It's made from pretty advanced technology, but it's not full of bells and whistles and gimmicks that take away from the museum's purpose.  It simply recreates the experience of browsing through the museum and seeing its many wonderful objects.


Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Panoramic Virtual Tour
Website:  www.mnh.si.edu/panoramas