Jumping Across the Pond: The British Museum Online Tours

Someday, hopefully soon, I'll be able to visit the U.K.  I'd like to be able to visit Scotland and Ireland and see the English countryside, and of course I want to visit London.  I'm especially interested in seeing the British Museum and I imagine I'll be one of those people who spends a whole day just wandering through the galleries.  Until that day, though, I can satisfy my curiosity with the British Museum Online Tours.

I haven't seen another virtual museum or virtual collection from a physical museum that bills itself as a tour.  Usually these entities like to refer to their online portions as exhibits, probably because they're hoping a web-based platform can provide an interactive experience that at least partially simulates a real, self-guided visit.  That's not what the British Museum aims to do here - there are no 3D renderings, animations or audio accompaniments.  The Online Tours are simply collections of objects with accompanying text.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, because the wealth of images and information available online is astounding.  You can view hundreds of objects from civilizations across the globe, and also nose through the images from several exhibits that deal with the modern world.  The images are high quality and many include notes about whether they can be used in the public domain.  I imagine that these online tours are quite like what you might encounter if you took a docent's tour at the British Museum:  a lot of looking and listening, with a heaping dose of expert opinion.

But if you're looking for something extra - a chance to explore the objects on your own terms or question the curatorial viewpoint - you're not going to find that here.  There is much more that the British Museum could do with their online collections that they have chosen not to pursue.  Multi-angle viewing would be nice, as would a chance to ask questions or add comments.  Perhaps a more unified online presence would allow visitors to connect these cultures and their objects to understand our present-day interdependencies and understand just how the British Museum ended up holding onto a headdress from the Marquesas Islands.

Still, the fact that these objects are even available for me to view at home, 3,500 miles from London, is amazing.  Even if I never do get a chance to visit the U.K., I can see at least some of their collections in vivid detail.  For that I'm grateful, as are many others who only want to know what the curator thinks.  I just wonder what else the British Museum could do with their online tours if they cared to try.



The British Museum Online Tours
Website:  www.britishmuseum.org/explore/online_tours.aspx

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

Your Insides Out: The History of Visualization of Biological Macromolecules On-line Museum

Look at the title above.  Does it make any sense to you?  Probably not, unless you've got some college-level biology classes under your belt.  I had to read the opening page of this museum - and then re-read it to make sure I caught all the salient points, and then look at some of the images - before I understood what this museum is about.  This is kind of how the museum operates:  slightly confusing for the layman but full of pretty pictures.

Biological macromolecules are the larger molecules in our bodies, like proteins and the nucleic acids in our DNA.  Collected here are images and movies scientists in earlier generations produced in order to bring these macromolecules to a human scale.  The earliest images come from 1946 and were created in MIT laboratories.  There is also a 3D model of a protein, some pictures of crystals, and the cover of a 1966 molecule catalog (unfortunately, the link to flip through the catalog is no longer working).

The coolest section is the Early Molecular Graphics Movie Gallery, which shows films of protein and insulin molecules from 1966 and 1971.  They're on the primitive side, but it's interesting to see just what these structures look like.

Each section is accompanied by plenty of footnoted text, but it's not too user-friendly.  I suspect this was written with fellow scientists, not the general public, in mind.  That makes this museum frustrating, because with a more explanatory tone these images could provide a truly enlightening look inside our bodies.

So stop by and take a look, and try to glean what you can, but don't feel bad if it doesn't make sense to you.


History of Visualization of Biological Macromolecules On-line Museum
Mission:  This site is an on-line archive dedicated to the various tools and techniques that have been used by molecular scientists to visualize and study the structure of biological macromolecules.
Website:  www.umass.edu/molvis/francoeur/index.html

Wave of the Future: The Adobe Museum of Digital Media

So far a lot of the virtual museums I've seen can be classified as collections of super-informative web pages.  They're all great and tell some interesting stories, but none quite mimics the experience of a real museum visit.  None, that is, except the Adobe Museum of Digital Media.

Visiting Adobe's museum actually feels somewhat like walking through a museum building.  The museum and its exhibits are set up as a 3D structure that's highly interactive - for example, the exhibits are laid out in a floating, rotating formation that move toward your mouse as you scroll through.  There are even several exhibits whose content changes as you move among them.

Right now the museum has five exhibits plus a video by the museum's founder.  Each exhibit includes text and audio commentary from the curator and spaces where visitors can leave comments and share each piece in their social media networks.  The current exhibits are InForm, which displays colorful and random infographics; Journey to Seven Light Bay, a virtual tour of the artist Mariko Mori's work Primal Rhythm; Valley, a collection of digital art by the artist Tony Oursler; A + B = C, a video by Rhode Island School of Design's president on the intersection between real and virtual worlds; and Making the Impossible, which tells the story of how this museum came to be.  I really can't do these exhibits justice by describing them, so I'll let you explore them on your own.

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media is an ideal of what virtual museums can be, and what I imagine they will look like in the future.  I realize that this museum is made possible by Adobe's deep pockets, and that most of the virtual museums out there aren't nearly as well funded, but I think we can pick up some great cues here about how to bring museums online to the wider world.  Pay close attention and take notes, because this might just be the future of museums.


Adobe Museum of Digital Media
Mission:  The mission of the Adobe Museum of Digital Media is to showcase and preserve groundbreaking digital work and expert commentary to illustrate how digital media shapes and impacts today's society.
Website:  www.adobemuseum.com

A Thousand Words: The Canon Camera Museum

In real life, if you were to encounter a museum about a product, housed within the headquarters of that product's corporate parent, what would you think?  Would you find the information trustworthy, or would you be skeptical?  Would you expect a slick, expensive presentation or a nerd-tastic display of every minute specification?

These are all questions I asked myself while visiting the Canon Camera Museum, which is hosted on Canon's website.  I found that a company museum can be both interesting and selectively cheery, as well as shiny and new and a little too technologically detailed for the average camera user.

The museum is set up as a virtual space with five buildings, each hosting a different exhibit, surrounded by digital fields and pastures (which looked unfortunately similar to Farmville).  One building is simply a short introduction to the museum, and the other buildings house History Hall, Camera Hall, Technology Hall and Design Hall.

History Hall, like the historical narratives of a lot of virtual museums, features blocks of text arranged as a timeline.  You can read the digest form, which is long, or the full story, which is even longer and can't possibly appeal to anyone who isn't writing a research paper.  History Hall also contains a slick presentation on the history of the EOS cameras, and even though this exhibit reads like a sales pitch, its layout is quite interesting.  The main screen pans slowly back through images of the EOS line, showing what products looked like each year, which creates an interactive timeline that you can click on at various points for more information.  I wish this was how Canon has chosen to present the rest of their history.

Camera Hall is a pretty basic showcase of images and specifications of Canon's digital and analog cameras and camcorders.  There's not much to it, which is nice because it's easily accessible for those of us who don't know or care too much about mechanical specifics.

Technology Hall goes into great detail about how cameras are made and what the science is behind each product.  In the Technical Room you can see demos of how different camera parts work.  You can also view a Virtual Camcorder Plant and a Virtual Lens Plant, both of which feature videos showing the process of creating different products.  The Lens Plant video is especially good, like something you might find in a real museum exhibit, but they are both a little too upbeat and couched in an aura of marketing and promotion.

Design Hall was the most impenetrable exhibit in the museum.  I had no idea what most of the links meant, much less how to navigate through them, because they were full of technical jargon and product names that I was unfamiliar with.  I was all but ready to give up when I saw the Making of Camera Design section, which unfolds as an interactive video explaining the process of making and marketing cameras.  It was nice, in this sea of confusion, to sit back and have someone explain what camera design entails - someone who assumes you don't have a technical knowledge of cameras and lets you go at your own pace.

I suppose if you really like cameras, or if you desperately need a chunk of information on the Canon company, the Canon Camera Museum is for you.  The rest of us will have to settle for cherry-picking the sections that are understandable and not too dull.  And though I appreciate the Canon dollars that went in to making the unique design and the many interactive components of this museum, I can't help be a little turned off by the sunny corporate message on display.  All in all, the Canon Camera Museum is worth at least a glance, as long as you understand that not everything will appeal to you, and remember who's keeping the lights on.


The Canon Camera Museum
Mission:  The Canon Camera Museum is a virtual facility presenting a wealth of information on Canon cameras.  You'll learn things you can't learn elsewhere as we highlight the appealing features of Canon cameras.
Website:  www.canon.com/camera-museum

Patents and Prejudice: The Black Inventor Online Museum

I can tell you when Black History Month rolls around (it's March) because we celebrated it every year when I was in elementary and middle school.  My teachers always put up illustrations of notable black Americans, and I learned a lot about George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.  There were other important people we learned about - usually though assigned reports we had to present - but the details of their accomplishments are sketchy in my mind.  I know that a black doctor invented the modern blood bank, and that traffic lights were the creation of a black man, but just who these men were escapes me.  Thanks to the Black Inventor Online Museum, I can learn more about these inventors, as well as many others who made devices we now take for granted.

The Black Inventor Online Museum is, simply, a collection of biographies interspersed with photographs and other images of these famous creators.  In this regard, the Black Inventor Online Museum isn't terribly innovative, but it makes up for this in the wealth of information it provides.  The museum spans most of black history in America:  from Benjamin Banneker's work planning out the nation's capital for George Washington, to IBM engineer Mark Dean.  The biographies are highly detailed, and most include either an image or a technical drawing of each inventor's work.

Using the helpful search page, I was quickly able to learn that Charles Drew was the doctor who discovered how to store blood for long-term use, and Garret Morgan patented the modern traffic signal.  I also learned that black Americans invented the mailbox, the raised golf tee and the beer keg tap. 

The only problem I have with the Black Inventor Online Museum is that, at times, it seems to be a swamp of advertisements.  Besides having Google ads on every page, there are also ads in the middle of each biography, and on some pages there are links to related books on Amazon.  I understand that online museums may need to generate revenue to ensure their survival, but having ads all over the place is distracting.

Don't let this deter you, though, because the Black Inventor Online Museum is a great place.  Whether you're a student who needs some inspiration for your Black History Month project, or an adult who just want to know more about where our modern conveniences come from, this museum is highly informative.  You'll leave having learned something you, and feeling thankful that someone more intelligent than yourself had the foresight to invent the third rail.

Black Inventor Online Museum

Mission:  The Black Inventor Online Museum is a look at the great and often unrecognized pioneers in the field of invention and innovation.

Website:  www.blackinventor.com

Computers, Not Fruit: The Apple Museum

I was all prepared not to like the Apple Museum.  After all, I'm not a computer geek - my eyes glaze over every time one of my technophilic friends starts talking about coding or trying to explain the new features on their iPhone.  So imagine my surprise as I was working my way through the Apple Museum and thinking, You know, this is actually kind of interesting.

The cool parts of the Apple Museum are the sections on Apple Facts, Codenames and Prototypes.  Apple Facts explains things like why the company was named Apple, where the Apple logo came from and what Carl Sagan has to do with Macs.  Codenames gives a pretty detailed list of what products were called internally as they were being developed (although, frustratingly, the origin of these names isn't explained).  Prototypes is my favorite part of this museum, because it includes pictures and descriptions of Apple products that were developed but never caught on in the market.  Who knew that Apple once tried to market a screen-based portable phone called W.A.L.T., or that there was a computer called Stumpy?

There's also a comprehensive Apple Data section, and although this part made no sense to me, it has a lot of detail on a lot of products, so I'm sure more computer-minded people would find it useful.  There are also biographies of four of Apple's founders and early developers - Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Rod Holt and Jef Raskin - which are nice additions to the website, but I suspect that you could find a lot more information on Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, amid this wealth of information, there are some problems.  The Products section of the website is completely empty, and the in the Timelines section only three of the five links actually work (and these are just data dumps of dates and products).  There is also a History section which could have a lot of potential, if only it weren't laid out in a Cliff Notes-style outline.  The text in the museum is also a little hard to work through because it's just not well-written.

If you can ignore these frustrations and just focus on the good parts, the Apple Museum really is quirky, informative and surprisingly fun.  If you love computers, this museum is for you - and even if you don't, I would recommend at least browsing.  You may find yourself, like me, beginning to reconsider that maybe computers aren't so nerdy after all.

The Apple Museum
Mission:  The Apple Museum of a non-commercial project, founded in 1998.  With our continuously growing database, we have become the largest and most comprehensive Apple history website on the internet.
Website:  www.theapplemuseum.com