Today I’m going to review two museums that offer an online version of their bricks-and-mortar museum exhibit. One is a national history museum, located in Berlin, while the other is a traveling temporary exhibit that has toured across Germany since 2003. In many respects they are not comparable, since the scale of the two sites and the resources available to each are quite different.
LEMO: Living Virtual Museum Online (LEMO: Lebendiges virtuelles Museum Online)
In the Federal Republic of Germany there are really only three federally funded museums at the national level – the German History Museum (DHM) in Berlin, the House of History (HdG) in Bonn (and since 2000 in Leipzig as well), and the Art Museum in Bonn. There is also the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, which is federally funded and has no permanent exhibit (other than the building itself), but rather hosts events and temporary exhibits that can be historical in nature, but can encompass any aspect of German cultural life. This virtual museum was actually a joint project between the DHM and HdG, with the DHM curating the pieces from 1871 to 1945 and the HdG those from 1945 to the present.
The purpose of the virtual museum, beyond preparing individuals and groups for their visits, is to provide access to its resources to an international audience, who might not have the ability to travel to Berlin to visit the museum personally. To this end, the “virtual” museum allows visitors to walk through a wide range of topics – both chronologically and thematically. A few years ago, you were also able to attempt a virtual walk through of the museum in 3-D. This was an interactive (and high-bandwidth) production that allowed the virtual tourist to experience the physical placement of items in the museum, push buttons to display more information, and zoom in to see digital versions of paintings and photographs on display at the “real” museum.For those who would like to see what that was like, they did preserve this function as a “guided tour” – but the visitor is no longer in charge of how one “walks” through the museum and all interactivity has been taken away.
Nonetheless, what we do have is a highly functional virtual museum. The epochs chosen are quite standard to the study of German history. Once you click on an era, say the Weimar Republic, the visitor is presented with a well-written overview of the period and its importance to understanding how the Weimar Republic fit within the larger history of Germany. The visitor is then given the ability to “drill-down” thematically – they could explore the revolution of 1918/1919, domestic politics, foreign policy, and other related topics. Once the visitor clicks on the theme, she is again provided with an overview and select primary documents (usually images) on the left that provide additional information.
Throughout each article, there are hyperlinks to primary texts and specialized essays that further enhance the ability of the visitor to learn about the topic they have chosen. The primary documents range from texts (digitized and viewable as a picture as well), sound clips, and videos. Often times, there are further “drill-down” options within the themes. Overall, the site is very accessible. Despite the fact that it isn’t as “flashy” as say the Digital Vaults project of the US National Archives, but it provides a massive amount of information on German history – much more than one could ever expect to gather in a traditional history museum – even among the largest national museums.
One very nice aspect of the site is a section called “Collective Memory” or Kollectives Gedächnis. Here, the website has solicited visitors (both real and virtual) to submit their memories about the time periods and events covered by the museum(s). Again, not as interactive as the Huricane Digital Memory Bank or even the new project by Der Spiegel called One Day or Eines Tages. But, since these memories are solicited by email and regular mail and then verified by museum curators, the authenticity of these oral histories take on a greater meaning for professional historians .
Against Dictatorship (Gegen Diktatur)
Another virtual museum site that is of note here is one that has been traveling around Germany since 2003 on the topic of the two dictatorships on German soil – the Nazi period and East Germany. This temporary exhibit was funded through federal monies and had a crew of professional museum curators who assembled the exhibit – including several academics who also work at major museums throughout Germany who served in an advisory capacity.
The emphasis in this exhibit is to highlight those Germans who resisted against dictatorship, many of whom fell victim to the regimes they opposed. Within the virtual museum portion of the website, the curators have provided thirty themes or sections, fifteen for each period. The site is not set up to allow direct comparisons between the two dictatorships – the themes chosen in each half of the exhibit do not parallel one another, but there are a few themes that do cross-over into both periods, such as youth opposition.
The texts that accompany each theme are short – assuming they are the same text that a visitor would have found had they seen the “real” exhibit in person – are well-chosen as representative of the topic that is being discussed and thus are paired very well. For those who want to learn more there are also “drill-down” elements that provide biographies of those involved and there are also primary texts and pictures provided for further reading and browsing. One potential problem is that some of the scanned images are too small to actually read some of the text, especially when handwriting is included. The ability to see the text as well as the original would have been a nice feature here.
An overall critique that needs to be voiced is that the virtual visitor is left without a guided tour of any kind. Visitors are free to pick and choose from what is offered. While there might be an advantage to this approach, the lack of any pedagogical guidance seems like a lost opportunity. Here we have a great example of a wonderful resource that could reach out to a much larger audience than the real exhibit, but the idea of guiding one through the evidence has been entirely removed from the “museum” experience.
Hi Jon,
These both look like really neat sites… I only wish that I could read German so that I could give a more complete impression of them! I have just finished reading this weeks readings about developing websites, and my thoughts about the readings are connecting with my thoughts about these websites. Specifically, I am thinking here about the enormous cost of website development and how that fits into the concept of the “virtual museum.” What is the cost/benefit ratio involved here? There has obviously been a lot of work put into developing the LEMO, but if it is largely an online reproduction of what can be found in the physical museum spaces, how much are the museums themselves benefited by this website? Why did they choose to go this route instead of making a website more akin to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which gives a taste of what is in the physical museum but doesn’t try to replicate anything close to the scope of the physical museum online?
Hi Jon,
I am also restricted by the language barrier here, but I’ll add a few thoughts nevertheless. I just finished posting on Karen’s blog about the “cost factor” of developing public history websites, only to find that Kate brings up similar questions here! I’m also curious — do we have a sense of whether these virtual exhibits bring anymore visitors/revenue to the museum itself?
I like the idea of the “Collective Memory” section of the LEMO website, and that the submissions are verified by historians before being included. I agree that it gives them more weight and credibility with professional historians, but I also think it has the benefit of encouraging visitors to be more engaged in how their nation’s history is interpreted and presented to the public. I think many people tend to view national history through the lens of personal experience. Perhaps visitors will be more inclined to stay and explore the virtual museum if they feel that they have something to contribute to it?
You both raise good points. In response or to add to what Kate mentions – the scope of the project is so large that the virtual museum has far more detail than the real museum(s). If you were at the museum and wanted to read more about a given person or event other than what was written on the wall, one would need to take note of it and research it at home. Here, the visitor can drill-down and find that sort of information immediately. However, your observation does lead to a potential distraction – too much information can be overwhelming. I think that any attempt at a virtual museum needs to compliment, not replicate, the holdings. Maybe show the highlights, but everything else should be an extension of the holdings or at least provide access to items not on display. Most museums have vast warehouses of items that are currently not on display and that the public rarely sees. When I was working in the archives of the DHM I had access to documents and photographs that were very valuable, but were not in use because the topic I was researching was not part of the permanent exhibit.
The cost of these virtual museums range from very expensive – like for LEMO – to very inexpensive – like the Against Dictatorship. There are fixed costs – the technological infrastructure – and there are variable costs – the time it took to organize the information and write the copy. For Against Dictatorship, the variable costs were assumed by the cost of creating the exhibit in the first place. Since it parallels the physical exhibit we have a low cost to port this exhibit to the web. LEMO had extra variable costs, since the text and research was separate from what is found in the physical museum exhibits of the two museums. LEMO was also done in cooperation with the Frauenhofer Institut, the brains behind MP3 and other digital technologies. Much of the cost and research went into the “other” version of LEMO that I discussed – the walk-around virtual museum. LEMO also benefited from some down-time in the permanent exhibit at the DHM – it was closed for two years of renovation and could build out some areas of LEMO during those years when the physical museum was closed.
Since both of these virtual museums are federally funded, the issue of revenue does not necessarily play a role. In Germany, and in Europe in general, publicly financed museums have a long tradition of playing a public service role that is independent of concerns about revenue – although some of this is changing. Museums are heavily subsidized by federal, provincial, and local governments in order to make museums accessible to all.
Visually (as I too, do not understand German) I think both sites are very interesting– I especially like what the first one has done with some pictures being put in a left frame What I’m most interested in is the virtual tour section of the Lemo site. I can’t access it. Well, every time I do, I click on a link that asks me if I want to open a RAM file, which I am not familiar with.
Are there other ways to present a guided tour? Bill suggested Podcasts in my entry, and now it has just occurred to me that Podcasts might be another way to be ADA compliant. How might that be less interactive than a video or highly sophisticated JAVA graphics? How “realistic” should a virtual historic tour be?