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

To Bomb or Not To Bomb: The Online Museum of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History

It's interesting that I stumbled across the online portion of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History recently.  I just got done reading an article in today's New York Times magazine about Iran's nuclear ambitions and the many problems that's spawned for the wider world.  Even more than two decades out from the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons are a serious matter in international politics - which is why I'm disappointed in the way these online exhibits choose to present nuclear history.

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History was chartered by an act of Congress and is a Smithsonian Institute affiliate.  With these credentials I would expect the museum to be an unbiased source of information - which is what they claim to be in their mission - and to have a decent online presence.  Alas, this is not the case.  In terms of layout, the online exhibits range from boring to frustrating.  The History section is nothing but text accompanied by tiny, un-enlargeable pictures.  The narrative veers all over the place, jumping to ancient history mid-paragraph or inserting addresses of publications into the body of a passage.  Some of the pages look like drafts that accidentally got published.

And that's the best section.  You can also choose to learn about Today, Future, and Other Resources, but the Today section is totally blank, and the Future section contains only a link to a campaign for the physical museum.  There are only two websites suggested in the Other Resources section, so if you really want to know more you're going to have to search on your own.

But what really bothered me about these online exhibits was that there is no real voice of dissent.  The opening image to the exhibits shows a woman holding a sign reading "War Ends", which tells you how the museum feels about nuclear weapons.  Throughout the History section there is really no information on anyone who believed nuclear buildup wasn't such a good idea.  For example, in the section The Decision to Drop, we hear only from the pilot of the Enola Gay, who was convinced that the United States made the right decision in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Nowhere do we hear from anyone who opposed these strikes, or from the thousands of Japanese civilians who suffered.  Curious too is the fact that in a long account of Einstein's contribution to the nuclear effort, we never hear about his regrets in contributing to the atomic bomb.

It can be easy to forget that nuclear weaponry was once feared by citizens across the globe.  I'll never grasp what it must have felt like to know that world leaders considered unleashing nuclear arsenals to be a viable option in world affairs, but it's wise not to forget the troubling realities of past generations.  So I'm not sure why the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History has chosen to sweep all this under the rug and package it in such an unappealing presentation.  Perhaps the physical museum is a more nuanced and informative place, but based on their online presence they've got a lot of work to do.


National Museum of Nuclear Science and History
Mission:  To bring an informational, objective history of nuclear science to life - for everyone, everywhere.
Website:  www.nuclearmuseum.org/online-museum

Colonists Online: Colonial Williamsburg Online Museum

I've been to Colonial Williamsburg twice in my life.  I don't remember the first time, because I was a little over a year old and I napped through the whole experience.  The second time was in the 8th grade, when I went as part of a school field trip, and I accidentally poked someone in the face with a stick that was supposed to be a musket.  I don't think I gathered too much knowledge during either trip (except for now understanding that muskets were sharp), but thanks to the exhibits Colonial Williamsburg has put online I can learn in the comfort of my own home.

Right now Colonial Williamsburg has four exhibits up online:  Historic Threads, Conserving the Murray Sisters, Coins and Currency in Colonial America, and Mapping Colonial America.  I was really excited about Historic Threads, because I love historical fashion, but this was the most disappointing of the exhibits.  Not because of the content - the images of gowns, suits and accessories are wonderful and are accompanied by great information about materials and time periods.  What was frustrating about Historic Threads was that it didn't work very well.  It's next to impossible to navigate between images - I would click the forward button and the previous image would stay on the screen, or the text would load but not its accompanying picture, or I would be left hanging in some kind of black limbo.  I found that the only way to get a screen to load properly was to refresh each page, which was so annoying that I gave up and moved on before I had seen half the exhibit.

Conserving the Murray Sisters takes on an interesting subject matter:  the scientific process of conserving artifacts.  Colonial Williamsburg was given a painting of these sisters dating from 1794, but it was too wrecked to display in its initial condition.  A series of images in this exhibit show the different steps conservationists took to restore the painting, including viewing it under different types of light.

Coins and Currency in Colonial America tries very hard to make a dull subject interesting by adding in a lot of features.  The coins are sorted by time period, from Columbus's travels to the end of the American Revolution, and are accompanied by notes on their history and metallurgy.  There are plenty of opportunities to seek out extra information and compare coins from the era, and you can even see a scale of each coin relative to a quarter.

Mapping Colonial America is probably the best online exhibit.  It's set up a lot like Coins and Currency, with maps arranged historically and information gathered in text boxes.  There's also a timeline running along the bottom that automatically sets itself to point at the time when each map was created.  The images of the maps have a great resolution - you can zoom in on each one and see a lot of detail.  On one map I was able to pinpoint the location of my hometown and still read the names of the surrounding villages and rivers.

Colonial Williamsburg's online exhibits are a great supplement to a visit and or an introduction for those who haven't been before.  Though some of the subject matter is a little dry, I would encourage you to check out all the functioning exhibits to see what you can glean from each.  As for Historic Threads, I really hope someone can get it to function better, because I need some sartorial escapism.

Colonial Williamsburg Online Museum Exhibits
Website:  www.history.org/history/museums/online_exhibits.cfm