The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum:
The Smithsonian has one of the best online catalogs I've seen in regards to our project. They offer a list of keywords (they call them object collections) with a thumbnail image for each one. You can pick your object collection and then you are directed to a page with thumbnail images of the objects in the collection, along with a brief description. Then you can click on the object of your choice to view the larger description. It's very clear, concise, nicely formatted. What's more, they have an oral history project online that describes in detail the oral histories they have recorded!
http://collections.nasm.si.edu/code/emuseum.asp
The Oral History project of the Smithsonian Air and Space:
http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/oralhistory.cfm
The Art Institute of Chicago:
Besides the Smithsonian, by far the best online collections I've seen are from the large art museums. Their pages are always easy to navigate and the ease with which you can either browse by category or find a specific work is much appreciated. With every object there is always a thumbnail image which is very helpful. It also adds an aesthetic dynamic to the page that is important. In other catalogs, such as the British Postal Museum, there are no images of the archival material. The Art Institute of Chicago is an especially nice example.
British Postal Museum and Archive:
Their online catalog is a little difficult to negotiate. It took me a while to find the online catalog and once I did you can't see the images, there are only the full descriptions. What was nice is that next to the search bar is a list of the most popular searches. I thought this was a good idea for our project, but substitute our keywords for the most popular search categories.
http://http://catalogue.postalheritage.org.uk/DServe/DServe.exe?dsqServer=localhost&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Index.tcl
Guggenheim Museum in Venice:
This site is also a good example of the art museum format. What's interesting is that they offer several ways to view the collection. You can searchby artist, where you can get a bio about the artist and their work. Then you can search via the specific rooms in the gallery and see thumbnail images which you can enlarge and read the full description. I like the choices this page offers. An idea for our database would be to allow choices for searching the keywords, which we could define and describe separately. Then we could create broader categories that would contain links to specific archival material.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute:
This site is great except that it doesn't show a list of keywords right off the bat. Once you do a search it will offer you other keywords to consider, but it would much easier if they offered you a list of categories or keywords to start with. The great thing about their format is that you can search under all categories or specifically under oral histories, manuscript collections, or multimedia. Also, for each object you find, there is a list with active icons that notes how many photographs, audio pieces, multimedia sources, or texts correlate with that object. It is a very intuitive page, but again, I wish they had a list of keywords to start with.
http://www.bcri.org/collections/collections_guide.aspx
http://www.bcri.org/collections/collections_guide.aspx
Comments (1)
Test Message>>>
Posted by Preerfugs | November 19, 2009 12:18 PM
Posted on November 19, 2009 12:18