Sunday, January 20, 2013

Faith, Hope and Love: The Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Museum

When we think about the saints of the Catholic Church, we usually imagine mystical figures - like St. George and his dragons - or sadistically tortured adherents such as St. Catherine, who died on a spiked wheel.  Most of these figures lived a long time ago, and it's easy to think that sainthood is a dying tradition.  But in fact, more modern figures are being canonized even up to this day.  One of these newer saints, Elizabeth Ann Seton, is the subject of a small online museum.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton has the distinction of being the first native-born American citizen to be granted sainthood.  During her short lifetime she made religious pilgrimages, founded of the first Catholic school in the United States, set up missions to help the poor, and created America's earliest Catholic women's religious order.  She was made a saint in 1975, and her legacy includes three American colleges:  Seton Hall University, Seton Hill University, and the College of St. Elizabeth.

How did I learn all this?  From the museum, which is highly informative without being boring.  Most of the pages contain no more than a few short paragraphs of text with images interspersed.  Rather than present tons of material all at once, the different periods of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton's life are broken down into sections and subsections that are well-labeled and easy to navigate.  The result is that you can learn a lot without being overwhelmed.

The only downside to this museum is its size - it's doesn't have very much content, and you can probably view everything in fifteen minutes or less.  There are educational resources offered - specifically, a CD with more information and activities - so you could potentially get more out of the museum.  But I think I'd rather the museum keep its size and its manageable content than expand and lose some of its charm along the way.  This museum just goes to show that it doesn't take mountains of information or flashy graphics to make an interesting virtual museum - just a well-crafted site and interesting material.


The Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Museum
Website:  www.scny.org/setonmuseum

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Science, Science Everywhere: The Museum of Science, Boston's Online Museum

I love science museums.  I work in one, I first got interested in museums while interning in one, and I try to visit as many as I can across the country (and the world).  So when science museums start putting content online and creating digital exhibits, I get pretty excited.  I think informal science education is fantastic, and the more that can be widely shared, the better.  So I'm happy with some of the Museum of Science, Boston's online offerings, but some of it just isn't that interesting.

First, the good.  Prominently featured are videos and audio clips about subjects as varied as NASA, magnetism and nanotechnology, which are good tools to draw curious amateur scientists in.  There are a couple of really interesting exhibits - on Ancient Egypt, nanomedicine and oceans - that do a pretty good job of recreating a museum-going experience online.  Particularly well done are an exhibit about Leaonardo da Vinci, which lays out a lot of information and images in a very approachable form, and a section on scanning electron microscopes, which is pretty bare-bones but absolutely lovely in its presentation.

But these sections are buried deep within the online museum.  The audio and video clips I mentioned above, while enlightening, aren't really what online museums should be focusing on - after all, sitting and watching or listening are pretty passive and minimally engaging activities.  The other featured content includes a pretty boring exhibit on alternative energy (a few pictures of solar cells spread among paragraphs of text isn't all that exciting) and some links that take you to pages about living lab projects going on in the physical museum.  I found these pages very frustrating because they're not at all like exhibits - instead, they read like the websites that universities put up about their various research labs.  There's not much educational content or contextualizing of the project, just profiles of the researchers and progress timelines.

These project websites seem like newer content, and if that's the case I would recommend that the Museum of Science, Boston stick to formats like its older online exhibits.  Pictures from powerful microscopes are incredibly cool, and so are da Vinci's sketches and games that let you act as a cancer doctor.  Interspersed that with some media clips and you've got a pretty good online science museum.


Museum of Science, Boston's Online Museum
Website:  www.mos.org/museum-online