http://www.exploratorium.edu
This is a great attempt to bring a museum online. There are practical details, plus
attempts to bring to life some of the San Francisco Exploratorium's 650 interactive
exhibits, from a 'duck into' kaleidoscope to the Ames room (it has no square corners). To
get the full effect of the Exploratorium pages, your system needs to support the JPEG
picture compression standard.
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http://www.echonyc.com/~whitney/WMAA/
The Whitney has gone for a simple but brilliantly affecting approach. Rather than
deluge visitors with whole exhibitions and information overload, it has put its efforts
into creating a forum for people to discuss art, the museum and its changing role in
American culture. Permanent as well as temporary exhibits are all here Ü anything from
Afro-american to Beat culture Ü but there is also a BBS for members, a collection of
conference papers to view, as well as a unique site for artists' projects on the World
Wide Web. Check out Hollywood Archaeology. Later in the year there's an exhibition called
Edward Hopper and the American Imagination. As well as visiting it online, it's possible
to order a catalogue, books and a poster from the store next door.
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http://www.roma2000.it/zmusvat.html#cosa
Now if you're going to Rome, definitely check this out first. Beautifully illustrated
and well-written this site lists all of the Vatican-controlled museums. There are a lot to
choose from and obviously they have a certain slant. Read about the Gregorian Museum of
Profane Art, the Biga Room and the Room of the Immaculate Conception - I'm not making this
up. For art lovers and historians this is a must and before you go you can print out a map
of all 24 museums
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http://www.compulink.co.uk/~museumgh/
It's a joy to meander around this gentle museum site, although it's nothing flashy and
some of the graphics are a bit poor. The content - a spot of gardening history, a few old
tools, featured garden designers etc - reveals what a little gem this London-based museum
is. Forget the cold frames, come into the warm and have a look around.
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http://key-west.com/tours/museum01.htm
If you're planning a museum tour of Key West (and who isn't), here's the site for you!
Eleven choices await you - there's an antique lover's dream in the form of The Curry
Mansion Inn, literary lovers can revel in the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum and for
history lovers there's the Wreckers' Museum - the most historic home in South Florida. Not
much in the way of illustration or interactivity, but what is there is well done and worth
a read. Quite why you would want to tour museums in such a lovely part of the world eludes
me though!
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http://www.rocknroll.org/
What an extremely lack-lustre, sad and sorry, routinely dull, wasted opportunity of an
excuse for a site. It could be a spangly sequinned celebration of rock celebrity and
culture, as presumably the museum is itself. Instead it's an almost entirely text-based
description of the museum's over-hyped exhibits. Why not show us Buddy Holly's high school
diploma or Hendrix' handwritten lyrics for Purple Haze? Could do better.
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http://www.nms.ac.uk
Seven museums are represented here under the umbrella of the National Museums of
Scotland, including the Museum of Antiquities, Shambellie House Museum of Costume and
Biggar Gasworks. Information on current exhibitions and permanent exhibits is included,
along with lists of publications, educational resources and how you can get to see them.
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http://www.ushmm.org/
Unfortunately this is not an attempt to put the museum's information on the Web but
merely a stopping off point when preparing for a visit. As well as details of what is
housed at its home in Washington, there is also a list of educational resources and, more
generally, some contacts for Holocaust research and organisations based mostly in the
States.
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http://www.ox.ac.uk/departments/hooke/
These very neat, precise, rather academic pages are actually very good. In one sense
there's quite a lot of text but it's accompanied by some great images of early scientific
instruments, portraits and illustrations from the museum's collections and all together
they provide a great insight into the cultural and historical development of science as a
discipline.
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http://www.net.org/
It's such a shame that what looks like an absolutely fantastic museum fails to
translate successfully to the Web. Great sounding exhibits like The Walk-Through Computer
and The Networked Planet are featured merely as text-based descriptions, and the potential
of these things online remains miserably underexploited.
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http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/timeform.html
Jump on the University of California's Museum of Paleontology's time machine for a
rocky ride through geological eras.
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http://www.cwc.lsu.edu
Strictly speaking this isn't a museum, it's a big time bona fide resource for anyone
interested in finding out about the Civil War.
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http://www.synergy.net/homeport.html
Having followed the discovery and restoration of the 16th century warship, The Mary
Rose, on Blue Peter, year in, year out, it's great to see it for the first time Üænot in
dock at Portsmouth but on the Web. The virtual tour is largely text-based and has that
'school project' quality but it's a history lesson at home.
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http://www.icsi.com/ics/morikami/
A few tranquil photographs and an item on the classical art of ikebana from the only
museum in the States dedicated exclusively to the living culture of Japan. Peaceful
indeed.
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http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/
Not the sort of site you'd want to hang around at for the whole of Sunday afternoon.
The Science Museum, after all, holds a monumental amount of stuff to shift around online.
Useful visitor information on exhibits and collections is easily accessed but the volume
of information is pretty specialised - educational materials, research resources and a
fair amount of academic text.
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http://www.bvis.uic.edu/museum
This Chicago museum has placed a multimedia tour of its DNA to Dinosaurs exhibit. You
can page through the eras, downloading movies and sound bites. There's also a display of
Javanese masks and more to come. One to show the kids.
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http://www.cnam.fr
Many used to come here for the random femmes page, but it's now behind shutters. Now
you'll have to be content with the Conservatoire's catalogue, a virtual tour of the Museum
of Arts and Crafts, and a nifty picture browser which takes files from newsgroups (such as
alt.binaries.pictures.misc) and compiles them into online contact sheets.
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http://www.nhm.ac.uk/
The is the first major UK museum to enter the Internet age. You can find out more
about the museum's activities, events and timetables and there are a few pictures. Not a
substitute for a visit, but a peek behind the scenes is nonetheless of interest. There are
also links to other sources about the earth, life sciences and the Walter Rothschild
Zoological Museum.
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