virtual museums

Virtual museums are basically web representations of museums. They can cover any and all subjects just as regular museums do. In fact, it seems that most of the virtual museums out there are a sort of web version of a museum that you can visit on foot. A few virtual museums only exist online, for example the Virtual Museum of Computing, http://vmoc.museophile.com/. Some virtual museums have a corresponding real location but have some content that only exists online, such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art http://www.sfmoma.org/. Check out e-space “created to explore new art forms that exist only on the web.”

It appears that virtual museums are not making much use of web 2.0 technology. I’ll talk more, in my next post, about what I find out in this area. In my personal experience virtual museums have been very helpful in allowing school children to view documents or artifacts first hand and use this material in their research. One nice virtual museums that I’ve used recently for this purpose is The Titanic Historical Society, http://www.titanic1.org/.