Historical Websites

Museums have recently been experimenting with new ways to use their online presence to impart knowledge to their audience. There are many types of information that it are difficult to present in the classic museum setting, particularly about the work that goes on behind the scenes of the museum.

George Washington's Mount Vernon has what I consider the best example of this. They have used their website, YouTube channel, and social media to dig into the process of historical research and present it to the public. Mount Vernon has been conducting major restoration work in the past few years and has used web-based media to show how historians and archaeologists gather the information needed to restore the historic architecture and museum objects.

The website for this project is: https://www.mountvernon.org/preservation/restoration-projects/restoring-mount-vernon/.

The website has been formatted in a way that the viewer can delve as deeply into each aspect as they'd like. The initial website gives an easy to read overview of each aspect of the project. Then readers are invited to explore individual projects within the restoration work. There are videos, photos, information, and even a "terminology" page for definitions of words involved with the project that the viewer might not know. Everything is clear, informative, and easy to navigate.

This sort of on-going or completed restoration work is very hard to present to the public in a traditional museum setting. By using their online resources properly, the Mount Vernon staff is able to teach the public about what Mount Vernon was like in the time of George Washington, and at the same time show how historical research is conducted.

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture has taken a more traditional method of presenting information online. It has taken the exhibition material that you would see in the museum and presented it the same way to a larger audience. For instance, they have created an online exhibit of their main in-person museum exhibit -  The Story of Virginia. The online exhibit can be found at: https://www.virginiahistory.org/what-you-can-see/story-virginia/explore-story-virginia.

The online exhibit exactly mirrors what is in the physical exhibit. There are even 360 degree tours that let you navigate through the actual exhibit. Though little information is added, this method allows the museum to provide the information to a larger number of people who might not be able to travel to the museum. This website can be used in classrooms throughout the state, including in schools that do not have the budget to allow a fieldtrip for their students to visit the exhibit in person.

In Chapter 1 of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, the authors Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig discuss how professional historians have had a harder time breaking free of the conventions of the history field when presenting history online. These two examples show both how older conventions can be used well to reach a larger audience, and how new methods of presenting history can be used for topics that are difficult to show the public in conventional settings.