ith holiday shopping mostly behind me, I decided to take my father to the DeCordova
Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln. Admission is just $6, and there's an amazing holography exhibit by Harriet Casdin-Silver that's showing through Jan. 3. My daughter had a great time, too, playing with a wall-sized computerized drawing machine. Later, at home, I checked out the museum's Web site, at www.
decordova.org.
The Web poses a difficult challenge for museums - one that few are handling well. Some museums use their Web sites as glorified brochures. They try to entice Web surfers to come to the museum and they provide limited directions. They might even provide a downloadable membership form, which visitors are encouraged to print out, fill in, and send to the museum using an envelope and stamp. Most of the time this is frustrating because most Internet users will never be able to physically visit the museums they can easily click to on the Web.
Other museums have taken a different approach. Deciding that their primary mission is education, and not fund-raising, these museums have produced dramatic Web-based exhibits that have more depth and information than anything you would ever see in a gallery. These exhibits can be captivating if you have a high-speed Internet connection, such as a cable modem or a DSL line. Unfortunately, for people with a conventional dial-up modem, a multimedia extravaganza can be more frustrating than uplifting.
Only a relatively small number of museums have taken a middle road and built Web sites that complement their exhibits. This path is perhaps the hardest and the most expensive to follow. Unlike a brochure, the Web site needs to be rich with information. But since a complementary Web site must be relevant to people who have seen the actual museum and those who have not, such a site frequently needs original content, which costs more money.
A museum that has been extremely successful in pulling off this balance is the Salem Witch Museum, with a Web site at www.salemwitchmuseum.com. The site has general information about the museum, including detailed maps that describe how to get there by public transportation and by car. There is information about the witch trials of 1692. But there is also an on-line tour of Boston communities with maps from 1692, drawings, contemporary photographs, stories, and biographies of historical figures. This site really involves the visitor, and it provides a lot of information to a broad cross-section of Internet users.
Another museum that has pulled off the mix of the virtual and the physical is the Computer Museum, with its Web site at www.tcm.org. The site has information about the museum's current exhibits; it also has on-line puzzles and activities that match the exhibits at the Congress Street museum. And the Web site has a lot of historic information about the history of computers, including a ''This Day In History'' page that changes every day. The real problem with the Computer Museum's Web site is that many of the site's features are buried and hard to find.
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (www.nasm.edu) is a valuable on-line resource, with photographs of aircraft, video clips, and lots of technical information. Many of the photographs are large, detailed images that can take 30 seconds or longer to download over the Internet. The museum has rightfully realized that when people care deeply about the subject matter, they are more than willing to wait for a big download.
Like a lot of museums, the Smithsonian is worried about the potential of theft from its Web site: one way the Smithsonian earns revenue is by selling publication rights to its photographs. To deal with this problem, the Smithsonian has put a watermark in the corner of many of the high-resolution photographs on its site. The watermark looks like those ''flying logos'' that are increasingly shown on television channels. They don't prevent theft, but they make it easier to track down copyright violations.
The Boston Museum of Science's Web site (www.mos.org) comes up somewhat short. Although there are brochures for the exhibits and calendars of special events, the museum could do so much more. For example, the museum could have slide shows or video clips that preview the Omni theater films; even better would be an electronic commerce system that would let people purchase tickets and reserve seats over the Internet. The Web site has resources for science teachers, such as easy-to-create experiments. But the site doesn't push the power of the Internet. Most of the experiments are described with text, rather than with diagrams or photographs.
If you want to see the future of on-line museums, click to www.
imj.org.il, and take the Israel Museum's on-line tour. The Web site uses a browser plug-in called WebGuide to give you a virtual-reality tour through three galleries that pertain to the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. As you pass through each gallery, you can click on an object to see it up close. The experience is very effective, although it does take a considerable amount of time to download the tour over those trans-Atlantic Internet links.
So how does the DeCordova Museum stack up? It's good, but not the best. One of the real charms of the DeCordova is its outdoor sculpture garden. That whole garden is on the Web site, letting after-hours visitors learn more about the pieces. Unfortunately, the images are all rather small. I'd like to have big, detailed photographs, perhaps accompanied by Quicktime VR images so I could ''walk'' around the sculpture and look at each piece from every angle.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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