Website Review: The Imperial War Museum

The English writer Thomas Hardy once remarked that "War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading." His idiom succinctly surmises the public's interest in the Imperial War Museum in London, and its branches in Duxford, Trafford, and Belfast. At the request of Sir Alfred Mond, the British government established the Imperial War Museum on March 5, 1917, at the height of World War One. The museum was originally designed to house items and artifacts related to First World War, but since its foundation the museum has altered its mission to preserve the history of "all military operations in which Britain or the Commonwealth have been involved since August 1914" (Imperial War Museum Website). The three branches of the museum house some ten million objects and artifacts relating to British military history, and approximately two million visitors from Britain and around the world come to the museums each year. The Imperial War Museum's website assists visitors by providing them with information concerning the museum's exhibits, activities, shops, and a data-base that allows users to quickly search through the museum's extensive collections.

The Imperial War Museum collection contains thousands of artifacts that visitors routinely expect to see in a military museum; including, uniforms, equipment, weapons, and even vehicles like tanks and airplanes. These impressive artifacts make up a good portion of the public displays, but the museum's collection also houses an extensive archives. Other objects artifacts in the collection include photographs, films, records, letters, and even artwork and posters, all related to the military history of Great Britain. The collection is demonstrative of the brutal nature of the wars in the twentieth century, as well as the ways these wars have affected British culture and society. But the sheer volume of artifacts and information can be overwhelming to visitors, and frustrating to researchers attempting to find specific materials.

Museums around the world have used the internet to make their collections more accessible to the public and those who are not able to travel to the museum. To further expand the public's access to the material in the collection, the Imperial War Museum's website includes a function that allows any visitor to the website the ability to search through a data-base of the collection materials, allowing anybody to efficiently search the museum's catalogue. Historians and other academics doing research can find and access the items in the collection, even if they are not able to come to the museum in person.

The Imperial War Museum's website provides users with many of the same features and information that other museums websites provide, such as admissions information and an online gift shop, but the website's collection data-base is the site's most practical tool. The museum's collection data-base offers interested members of the public and professionals easy access to the museum's entire collection, and moves visitors' experiences beyond the museum's public displays and exhibits.

Work Cited
The Imperial War Museum Website. The Imperial War Museum. http://www.iwm.org.uk/

Exhibit Review

The face museums present to the public is their exhibitions and displays, but they also keep large collections of various artifacts that function as research depositories. One such research collection is the M.T. James Entomological Collection at Washington State University, which boasts an insect collection of approximately 1.25 million specimens. The collection functions as the State of Washington's official entomological depository and is available to researchers interested in studying its specimens. However, the M.T. James Entomological Collection has no permanent exhibits or displays available to the general public. While the Entomology collection at Washington State University is impressive in its scale, its lack of availability to the public visitors limits its potential to educate the broader population.

The biggest improvement the WSU entomological collection could make is to further develop its accessibility to the public. The collection currently arranges temporary displays during certain times of the year, usually when the university has a lot of visitors; for example, homecoming weekend, graduation, or when perspective students come to visit the campus. But with no room for permanent displays in their own facility, such shows tend to be very short term. Ideally the university should expand the area housing the insect collection to include a small museum open to everybody, but budgetary restraints prevent this from being a reality. Until the university builds such a facility there are several other possibilities to improve the collection's accessibility to the public.

One possibility is to loan a portion of the collection to other institutions for their own temporary displays. The university could lend specimens in the collection to other museums for use in displays and exhibits. In addition to loaning specimens to other museums with biological collections, there are also several other local groups that would appreciate having more hands-on access to the collection for its educational value. The Palouse Discovery Science Center and the school districts within the vicinity of Washington State University are just two examples of organizations that would be interested in borrowing parts of the collection. Other avenues might be colleges and universities within the Pacific Northwest, who might expand on their own research or provide exhibits. Temporarily lending out a small portion of the collection would bring it to students who might not be able to visit the collection at the Washington State University campus in Pullman, Washington; however, putting items on loan could jeopardize the collection if specimens are lost or destroyed in the process.

Tours of the M.T. James Entomological Collection can be conducted in the existing facility and are available to those who are interested in its educational value, but by appointment only. The spatial restraints of the collection's current facilities also make these tours slightly uncomfortable given the cramped and cluttered conditions of the environment. With a lack of space being the collection's biggest drawback, another consideration might be to move the entire collection to a better facility that has more room and where the public without an appointment can view displays of the items. If the insect collection needs a new facility on the WSU campus, there are several possibilities, including building a new space for the collection, moving the collection to a larger area, or combining the M.T. Entomological collection with another biological collection. Each option has it benefits and drawbacks, but the real difficulty is that WSU does not have funding for any expansion or new structure.

Despite a modest amount of space and limited resources, the M.T. James Entomological Collection is one of the largest university insect collections in the United States. As an invaluable resource for young and old, alike, the collection offers information on the significance of insects in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the world. As the world faces growing environmental challenges, the role insects play in our ecosystem needs to be understood better by everyone. But visitors to the collection will likely find the current area housing the collection to be confining, especially for larger groups. A special exhibit area could dramatically improve the experience of those who come to visit the collection, grounding the experiences of visitors in a more museum-like setting.

Many people find insects disgusting, repulsive, and even terrifying. Many people are afraid of bugs. Some of these fears and misconceptions are simply the result of ignorance, and expanding the public's access to entomological collections and bringing these insects into exhibits will educate the general public about insects, and it might even help relieve the phobias many people have of these valuable creatures.

A Vision of New York City: 2080 AD

Most exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art in New York focus on the achievements contemporary artists. But a new exhibit takes an intriguing look into New York City's future. The exhibit "Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront" examines how the city will respond to the predicted rise in sea levels over the next seventy years. The images of the hypothetical New York of 2080 look like an abandoned city, with nature reclaiming the land once inhabited by human beings, but the project is actually the result of the combined efforts of several landscape design and architecture companies. Concept sketches show a dramatically altered New York City waterfront, with swamp and wetlands reclaiming portions of Manhattan. The exhibit demonstrates how green technology can integrate with urban environments, and New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff lauds the project as "the most coherent model we have for a sustainable city in the current century." So will New York City look like in 2080?

The New York City of the future will utilize several new green technologies to protect and renovate the city in a changing world. Some of the proposals provide practical solutions to serious problems. One proposal suggest that in the New York of the future streets of will not be made of asphalt or concrete, but from a porous material designed to absorb and collect rain water. Other ideas include the construction of a bio-fuel plant in Bayonne, New Jersey, and an artificial reef system off the coast of New York harbor. Some concepts presented in the exhibit seem a little more preposterous. A couple of the more farfetched plans include converting the Gowanus Canal into an oyster farm, and off-shore housing developments built on artificial islands. Most of the proposal would greatly alter the landscape, and the proposed New York of 2080 looks radically different from the New York of the 20th century. But the exhibition on display at the Museum of Modern Art effectively demonstrates the challenges the city faces and how it will have to change during the next century.

Global warming and rising sea levels will not only have a dramatic affect on New York's environment, but its economy as well. Melting ice caps may open a trans-arctic shipping passage by the middle of the twenty-first century, seriously jeopardizing New York City's position as an international shipping capital. In order to thrive in the twenty-first century, New York will have to re-envision itself in order to adapt to a changing world. The projects and design elements presented in the exhibit provide interesting solutions to the problems facing many modern cities, but the draw of the 'Rising Currents' exhibit is the compelling vision of the future that it offers. Museums strive to preserve our cultural heritage for future generations, but in this instance a museum has taken a look in to the future to inform and educate the public about the impact of climate change and the importance of developing green technology.

Works Cited
Ouroussoff, Nicolai. "Imagining a More Watery New York." New York Times. March 26, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/26/arts/design/26rising.html

Museum Architecture

The museums built in the 19th century reflect their stature as temples of knowledge, and their architecture reflects this perception in neo-classical and neo-gothic designs. In the twentieth century, museum architects began to strike out beyond those early temple and cathedral models (Geibelhausen 41-47). Among the museum buildings built in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Edo-Tokyo Museum stands out as a striking example of modern museum architecture. Located in Tokyo's metropolitan district of Ryōgoku, the museum's ultra-modern architectural design fits right in with the surrounding buildings. Edo-Tokyo Museum is built uniquely elevated above the ground, the landmark feature of the museum's design. The museum's website explains the design is an interpretation of a traditional elevated warehouse in Japan. Visitors access the museum through a tunnel-like escalator running underneath of the building. But the Museum's modern facade is only the casing which holds the treasures within. The contemporary architecture and radical design of the building's exterior is similar to many modern art museums, but the building's interior design and exhibit content is contrastingly traditional.

The people who visit the Edo-Tokyo Museum find themselves submerged in the last 500 years of Tokyo's history. Edo-Tokyo Museum was established in 1993, its purpose being "to preserve the historical heritage of Edo-Tokyo"(Edo-Tokyo Museum Website). The museum's exhibits move visitors through the nation's Shogunal and Imperial past, and in to Japan's transition to the modern era. The institution serves not only as a museum with collection and exhibitions, but also as a cultural center for public education. Because of this aspect of their mission, the museum boasts an impressive library that contains over 140,000 volumes on Japanese history and culture, most of which are available to the public (Edo-Tokyo Museum Website). The Edo-Tokyo Museum's mission as a cultural center expands on role of museums in society, and is indicative of the changing nature of museums in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Works Cited

Geibelhausen, Michaela. The Architecture IS the Museum, from Marstine, Janet, ed. New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 41-60

The Edo-Tokyo Museum. Edo-Tokyo Museum, http://www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp/english/index.html

When museum directors consider what exactly makes their museums successful, they tend to look at their many objectives. These objectives typically include the conservation of their collections, education value of their exhibits, and public enjoyment. What exactly museums consider quality and success may vary from museum to museum, depending on their exact mission statement. However, the museum director's perspective differs widely from the public's point of view. For the public, a museum is successful if the visitor leaves with a lasting impression of the museum's contents and intent. While the collected objects in the exhibition are the focusing point of a typical museum visit, other factors such as architecture and other design elements can enhance or diminish the visitor's museum experience. In particular, the buildings museums occupy establish the way in which a visitor experiences the exhibition. The structure of a museum can guide visitors through exhibits by moving them along carefully connected rooms and corridors, or allowing them to move freely through open space.

E.T. Linenthal's book Preserving Memory examined how the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. guides their visitors through an exhibit which advances the narrative of the Holocaust as the visitor progresses through the museum. This method of moving visitor's through an exhibit work well in this instance, since the Holocaust Museum has a narrative to present that the visitors move through. But such an orderly and structured system is not as conducive for the objectives other museums. Art museums, for instance, might want their attendants to take their time as and appreciate the art on display in the museum, and might find moving their visitors through their museum like cattle contradictory to their objectives. Instead, an art museum might consider large open galleries, like those in the Seattle Art Museum. The large open spaces and allows visitors to take their time with any given gallery or pieces of work, without having visitors feel like there is something they need to see next or move on to. Both methods are very effective at achieving the goals their museums have set, it is important to remember how the structure of an exhibit, and the museum as a whole, affects the experience of the visitors.

Museums: The Intellectual Rationale

Once when I was a teenager, I visited a natural history museum that had an articulated skeleton of a saber-tooth tiger on display. I recall looking at the Simlodon and realizing that there were several things wrong with the skeleton. At first I realized that what I was looking at was not the cat's actual skeleton, but rather a plaster casting of the original bones. I became aware that I was not looking at the remains a living creature at all, but rather an artificial representation of that creature removed from its original environment. The problem that I encountered with the saber-toothed tiger was that the article on display was removed from its role as a fearsome Neolithic predator. This phenomenon of context is not unique to the displays at natural history museums. Anthropological collections on display are frequently removed from the customs and ideas of the culture that produced the artifact. The average museum attendee might consider an idol made by a tribe in New Guinea to be exotic, and usually the people who have catalogued and described that object have no connection to the artifact's cultural origins. As a result some people who visit museums feel that the collections "seemed to lack contact with the human communities from which the material had come from, and real understanding remained elusive." (Pearce, 109)

What a fossilized skeleton on display does not answer is where and how then animal lived. A saber-toothed cat's skeleton provides scientist with a wealth of information about the animal, but when the skeleton is placed on display that information is lost because the skeleton is removed from the world in which the Simlodon lived. A display that also included a model of what a living saber-toothed tiger looked like in among a reconstructed Neolithic environment might place the skeleton back into the context of a living, breathing creature. The problem that museums face in the 21st century is keeping their collections relevant to the viewing public. In order to maintain relevance museums must endeavor to place their exhibits back into the context of their origins. Without context, a museum display is nothing more than a few curiosities in a glass boxes.

Works Cited
Pearce, SM. "Museums, Objects and Collections." Smithsonian. pp 89-117. 1992

The Museum as a Way of Seeing

The essay The Museum as a Way of Seeing by Svetlana Alpers proposes that museums establish their own way of seeing an object, dubbed the 'Museum Effect.' When an object is placed in a museum and put up for the display and contemplation of others, that object becomes estranged from its place of origin and its original cultural context. In this way, even mundane objects, such as a crab shell, become exotic objects that provoke the interest of its viewers. In her article, Svetlana Alpers believes this added interest, by which objects placed in a museum possess an importance and power that they might not have otherwise had outside of its display case, is what makes museums so special. Museums use this way of seeing to capture the interest of visitors viewing the objects in their collections.

Objects on display in a museum are carefully selected from their collections because they are of artistic or intellectual value to the public. When items are placed on display for the enjoyment of the community, all objects in a collection essentially become works of art. And, like art, some things placed in a museum can be strange or even controversial. The museum effect is perhaps strongest in the most unusual of objects of a collection. The strangest thing that ever caught my attention in a museum was a small replica of Stonehenge on display at the Experience the Music Project in Seattle. The object was a prop used in the movie This is Spinal Tap during one of its funniest scenes. By itself, the statue is a hunk of Styrofoam that is nearly worthless, but to those who have seen and enjoyed the film, the statue is elevated from a mere prop to an object of cultural value. When this little Styrofoam Stonehenge was placed in a glass case, the museum "encouraged one to look at it in this way" (Alpers 25).