Outstanding Virtual Museums:
A Pathfinder to Information on
Exemplary Virtual Museum Projects
Holly
King
Graduate School of Library and
Information Science
The University of
Texas at Austin
LIS
382L.2
Information Resources in the
Humanities
October 30, 2000
* Introduction
* Bibliography
* Pathfinder
Today the Internet teems with virtual museums, which vary widely in content, quality, and usefulness. According to one estimate, more than 5,000 virtual museums are currently available on the World Wide Web (Douglas Davis, “The Virtual Museum, Imperfect But Promising,” New York Times, 24 September 2000, sec. 2, p. 1). From this bewildering array, it can be difficult to determine which ones are truly outstanding.
This pathfinder will assist graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) in finding outstanding virtual museums and in learning what makes certain virtual museums better than others. It will help answer such questions as: What makes a virtual museum interesting, useful, or outstanding? What criteria are used in evaluating virtual museums? Are there awards for virtual museums? How can one find outstanding virtual museum projects?
My research had four main phases. First, I referred to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, available through UT Library Online [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/], for a general overview of the topic. By searching for the phrase “virtual museum,” I found a useful article and references to related web sites. Next, I searched in UTNetCAT, the online catalog at UT-Austin. Here I ran into a small stumbling block, as there were no subject headings for “virtual museums” or “digital museums” (although I did find a subject heading for “digital libraries”). Instead, I performed a mixed keyword search using “museum or museums” and secondary terms such as “virtual,” “internet,” “net,” “digital,” “online,” and “web.” These search strategies produced a limited number of results, although I found a few relevant monographs. Third, I investigated online indexes, abstracts, and full-text resources available through UT Library Online. The three databases that proved most useful in terms of number and relevance of items retrieved were Art Abstracts, Humanities Abstracts, and Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. I searched both Art Abstracts and Humanities Abstracts using the keyword search “virtual museum”; I also used the databases’ descriptors (subject headings) to find additional relevant articles. I had to take a broader approach with Lexis-Nexis and used a similar search strategy to that employed with UTNetCAT.
Finally, I used the Google search engine [http://www.google.com/] to search the Internet for appropriate materials using the term “virtual museum,” as well as some of the term combinations listed above. I was able to find numerous web sites, articles, organizations, and other resources related to virtual museums. To select from these items, I focused on information that was recent (within the last five years) and authoritative; items that included or described criteria used to evaluate virtual museums; and sites with lists of recommended or award-winning virtual museums. For the purposes of this pathfinder, I considered virtual museums and online museums as synonymous.
All materials selected for my bibliography and pathfinder are available through the UT-Austin General Libraries, via UT Library Online, or on the Internet. This pathfinder is also available on the Internet at http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~vmuseum/king.html.
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Style manual:
Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Terms Papers,
Theses, and Dissertations, 6th ed. Revised by John Grossman and
Alice Bennett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Encyclopedias
1. “Virtual museum,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. <http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,232+1,00.html> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
Explains what virtual museums are and how they vary widely in content and scope; some are limited to mainly administrative information, while others offer “virtual exhibitions.” Also provides links to six virtual museums that Britannica rates with four or five stars. Serves as a useful introduction to the topic and a way to find a few recommended virtual museums. To access, select Britannica Online from the UT Library Online home page and search for “virtual museum.”
Monographs
2. Karabin, Amy Margaret. “Investigating Art Museum Web Sites: A Three-part Approach.” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1999. [THESIS 1999 K144, PCL Stacks]
A scholarly approach to evaluating the technologies, content, and educational features of virtual art museums. Karabin’s main goal is to help educators investigate and rate art museum sites, but this work also can help students discern why some sites are “better” or more useful than others. Of particular interest are her reviews of ten virtual museums, as well as an extensive bibliography.
3. Keene, Suzanne. Digital Collections: Museums and the Information Age. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. [AM 133 K44 1998, Fine Arts Library]
Keene gives a broad, technical overview of opportunities and issues related to virtual museums; she also discusses the current state of the virtual museum world. Chapter 5, “Standards and choice,” and Chapter 7, “Let’s hear it from our users: design and evaluation,” are especially useful to readers interested in outstanding virtual museums. An 11-page “Sources and further reading” section points readers to several pertinent items and web sites, such as the Art Museum Network and the Virtual Library Museums Pages.
Online Databases
4. Art Abstracts [online database]. Bronx, N.Y.: H.W. Wilson, 1984–present. Updated monthly.
Available through UT Library Online; choose “Indexes, Abstracts, and Full Text.” Indexes more than 400 major art periodicals and publications; also provides abstracts for materials published since 1994. Select advanced search and enter keywords “virtual museum+”; then narrow your search by selecting dates, item type, language, full text (or not), and ranking (by date, relevance, or none). Also check the box for “Items in my library.” Once you have retrieved useful items, note the accompanying descriptors (subject headings), and click on these to retrieve similar items.
5. Humanities Abstracts [online database]. Bronx, N.Y.: H.W. Wilson, 1984–present. Updated monthly.
Available through UT Library Online; select “Indexes, Abstracts, and Full Text.” Indexes more than 465 sources in the humanities; items include articles, interviews, and reviews of books, plays, and television shows. Also provides abstracts for items since 1994. To perform a search, follow the instructions used with Art Abstracts (Humanities Abstracts employs the same interface, OCLC FirstSearch). Note that Humanities Abstracts has a “virtual museums” descriptor, but Art Abstracts does not.
6. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe [online database]. Dayton, Ohio: Lexis-Nexis Group, 1997–present. Updated continually.
Available through UT Library Online; click on “Indexes, Abstracts, and Full Text.” The General News category (under the heading News) offers full-text articles from major English-language newspapers and magazines, both American and international. Enter the keywords “(virtual museum) or (digital museum) or (online museum) or (web museum).” Narrow your search with the additional keywords “outstanding or best or good or award.” Other options include source (choose “Major Newspapers”) and date range.
Articles
7. Davis, Douglas. “The Virtual Museum, Imperfect But Promising.” New York Times, 24 September 2000, sec. 2, p. 1. [Available through Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.]
Gives a different viewpoint on excellence in virtual museums. Davis claims that most virtual museums are “boring” and argues that the best ones are personalized and interactive. He mentions several virtual museum sites worth visiting (including the World Museum of Erotic Art and the Sulabh Museum of Toilets!), although the article does not provide URLs. Davis also predicts that the interactive trend soon will spread to more well-known virtual museums like the Museum of Modern Art.
8. Stuart, Anne. “Culture Shock: At the World’s Great Museums, Guardians of the Past Are Meeting the Technology of the Future.” CIO Web Business Magazine, 1 June 1998. Available at: <http://www.cio.com/archive/webbusiness/060198_museum.html> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
A general overview of benefits and drawbacks for museums with virtual presences. Stuart devotes part of her discussion to issues of concern for virtual museum creators such as size and quality of images, development costs, and intellectual property rights. Includes links to 15 excellent virtual museums, both American and international.
Associations and Conferences
9. Art Museum Image Consortium. Available at: <http://www.amico.org/home.html> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
This exciting site is produced by the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), “a not for profit association of institutions with collections of art, collaborating to enable educational use of museum multimedia.” Contains approximately 65,000 works of art, with miniature images available for free public viewing. More features (such as sound, video, commentaries, and histories) are available by subscribing to the AMICO Library, an educational product. AMICO.org includes a search function (with both simple and advanced search capabilities), allowing users to search for artworks by name.
10. Museums and the Web Conferences. Available at:
<http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.html> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
The Museums and the Web (MW) international conferences, held annually since 1997, offer a scholarly perspective on virtual museum issues. The conferences are sponsored by the Pittsburgh-based consulting firm Archives and Museum Informatics (A&MI). Of special interest to those interested in outstanding virtual museums is the link to papers from past conferences (http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/SPEAKERS_LIST.HTML), with many full-text versions available online. Note also that A&MI’s site offers full-text searching and a link to the International Conferences on Hypermedia and Interactivity in Museums (ICHIM) (http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/ichim.html).
Internet Resources
11. Art Museum Network. Available at: <http://www.amn.org/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
The Art Museum Network (AMN), “the official website of the world’s leading art museums since 1996,” features a lengthy list of international art museums, focusing mainly on the Western world. The list appears in alphabetical order only; no attempt is made to subdivide the list by country or museum type. Users can link from the list to an AMN administrative page about each museum, and from the administrative page to the museum’s web site itself. Useful primarily as a single source of web addresses for well-known art museums in the United States and Europe.
12. Best of the Web: Museums and the Web 2000. Available at: <http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/best/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
The Museums and the Web conferences (described above) present annual Best of the Web awards to virtual museums. As described on the site, award categories include: best online exhibition, most innovative or experimental application, best educational site, best research site, best site for museum professionals, and best overall site. Criteria, nominees, winners, and judges’ comments are all included. Also available are links to results from the 1997-1999 contests; ironically, the links for 1997 and 1998 are broken (the correct URLs are http://www.archimuse.com/mw97/mw97best.htm and http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/frame_best.html). An excellent source with authoritative recommendations.
13. Google Web Directory: Museums. Available at: <http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Museums/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
Google [available at: <http://www.google.com/>] is one of the most popular Internet search engines because of its speed and accuracy of response. It is supplemented by a Web Directory (available from Google’s home page), which organizes web sites by topic. Under Museums (found in the Reference topic), the directory lists museum sites by category and also provides 15 sites about museums and the Web, such as Museumland, Musée, and Museoweb. Internet searchers will find Google and its Web Directory to be good starting points to find information on and lists of outstanding virtual museums.
14. Virtual Library Museums Pages. Available at: <http://www.icom.org/vlmp/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
Sponsored by the International Council of Museums, this outstanding resource bills itself as “a comprehensive directory of on-line museums and museum-related resources.” Contains hundreds of links to virtual museums, libraries, galleries, and archives worldwide (the best sites are starred), as well as numerous other links of interest. From the home page, note especially the Overview and Other Lists links. More than 1,000 virtual museums and information centers are listed for the United States alone. The site is maintained by Jonathan Bowen, professor of computing at London’s South Bank University and a noted expert on virtual museums.
15. WashingtonPost.com Museum Links. Available at: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/museums/museumlinks.htm> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
A concise list of what the Washington Post has deemed “the most intriguing, best designed Web sites for national and world museums.” Provides links to 24 American museums, 26 international museums, and eight miscellaneous museums. This source furnishes a good representative sampling of outstanding virtual museums. Gives special recognition to the Whitney Museum of American Art (http://www.whitney.org/), calling the museum’s web site “a work of art itself.”
16. World Wide Arts Resources. Available at: <http://wwar.com/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
World Wide Arts Resources calls itself an “interactive arts gateway.” Although this is a commercial web site, it offers a substantial collection of sites on the visual and performing arts, with categories such as Artists, Museums, Art History, and Online Exhibitions. The Museums category is further divided into eight subcategories, including lists of virtual museums by alphabetical order, country, historic period, and type. A disclaimer states that “All resources are reviewed in person by one of our team editors for accuracy and excellence” before inclusion on the site.
Purely Virtual Museums
17. ArtServe. Available at: <http://rubens.anu.edu.au/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
This purely virtual museum (with no corresponding physical presence) contains a staggering 130,000 images of art and architectural works, with a focus on classical and Renaissance art. ArtServe is maintained by Michael Greenhalgh, professor of art history at Australian National University (ANU), and is primarily aimed at students and teachers of art history. Quantity of images is emphasized over commentary and organization, and users outside ANU cannot zoom in on images. However, worth visiting for the breadth of its collection and as a comparison to WebMuseum, Paris.
18. WebMuseum, Paris. Available at: <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/> [Accessed 28 October 2000].
Another purely virtual museum, created by Nicolas Pioch in 1994 and expanded by volunteers among the site’s users. Although it was last updated in 1996 and a few links are now broken, it is well worth perusing. It reproduces hundreds of famous works of art with amazing clarity (click on the miniature versions for larger reproductions) and includes informed commentary on each artist and type of work. The Très Riches Heures (a 15th century book of hours) exhibit is especially breathtaking when enlarged. Unfortunately, no information is given to explain the site’s lack of development since 1996.
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Prepared by Holly King
Today the Internet teems with virtual museums, which vary widely in content, quality, and usefulness. Thousands of virtual museums (also called online museums) are currently available on the World Wide Web. From this bewildering array, it can be difficult to determine which ones are truly outstanding.
This pathfinder will help graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) find outstanding virtual museums; discover how virtual museums may be evaluated; and learn what makes certain virtual museums better or more useful than others. All materials listed here are available through the UT-Austin General Libraries, via UT Library Online [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/], or on the Internet. This pathfinder is also available online at http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~vmuseum/king.html.
Where can I find general information about virtual museums?
Consulting an encyclopedia is a good way to start your search. You can access the Encyclopedia Britannica Online from the UT Library Online home page. Search for the phrase “virtual museum.”
* “Virtual museum,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,232+1,00.html
Where can I find books about outstanding virtual museums?
Search the UT General Libraries by using UTNetCAT, available through UT Library Online. Cast a broad net in your search by selecting “Keyword Search” (a keyword is a search term) and then using mixed keywords (this technique will search all parts of a catalog record, including subject, author, title, and notes). In the first box, enter “museum or museums”; in the second box, enter secondary terms like “virtual,” “internet,” “net,” “digital,” “online,” and “web.” The two boxes should be connected by the term “AND.”
Two especially useful sources are listed below. Note that both items include lengthy bibliographies with many helpful resources and web sites.
* Karabin, Amy Margaret. “Investigating Art Museum Web Sites: A Three-part Approach.” M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1999. [THESIS 1999 K144, PCL Stacks]
* Keene, Suzanne. Digital Collections: Museums and the Information Age. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. [AM 133 K44 1998, Fine Arts Library]
Where can I find newspaper and journal articles about outstanding virtual museums?
UT Library Online offers numerous indexes from the link to “Indexes, Abstracts, and Full Text.” A good source for full-text newspaper articles is Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
* Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe [online database]. Dayton, Ohio: Lexis-Nexis Group, 1997–present. Updated continually.
Select News: General News. Enter the keywords “(virtual museum) or (digital museum) or (online museum) or (web museum).” Narrow your search with the additional keywords “outstanding or best or good or award.” Select a source (“Major newspapers”) and date range.
To find journal articles, return to the list of “Indexes, Abstracts, and Full Text,” and notice that resources can be listed by subject. Select “Arts/Humanities,” and peruse the list of databases. Two databases that contain information on virtual museums are Art Abstracts and Humanities Abstracts.
* Art Abstracts [online database]. Bronx, N.Y.: H.W. Wilson, 1984–present. Updated monthly.
* Humanities Abstracts [online database]. Bronx, N.Y.: H.W. Wilson, 1984–present. Updated monthly.
Select advanced search and enter keywords “virtual museum+”; then narrow your search by selecting dates, item type, language, full text (or not), and ranking. Also check the box for “Items in my library.” Once you have retrieved useful items, note the accompanying descriptors (subject headings), and click on them to retrieve similar items. UTNetCAT will indicate where to find copies of the selected journals.
Where can I find information about outstanding virtual museums on the Internet?
Start by referring to the Karabin and Keene bibliographies (see “Where can I find books about outstanding virtual museums?” above). Both works list web sites on virtual museums.
Next use an Internet search engine. Google [http://www.google.com/] offers tremendous speed and accuracy. Use the same search terms employed with Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. Note also Google’s Web Directory, which organizes web sites by topic.
Here are a few sites worth visiting:
* Art Museum Image
Consortium
http://www.amico.org/home.html
* Art Museum
Network
http://www.amn.org/
* Best of the Web: Museums and the
Web 2000
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/best/
* Virtual Library Museums
Pages
http://www.icom.org/vlmp/
* WashingtonPost.com Museum
Links
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/museums/museumlinks.htm
* WebMuseum, Paris
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/
For
more information, please contact me at hking@gslis.utexas.edu,
or ask a reference librarian for
assistance.