Building a Virtual Museum
Community

Virtual museums provide an excellent opportunity for museums to partner with schools. The Bellingham (WA) public schools, a leader in the development of school Web sites, recognized the potential of a partnership with the Whatcom County Museum of History and Art as early as the Fall of 1995. This article describes how that partnership led to the development of a virtual museum devoted to local history at the turn of the 19th Century and will eventually foster the growth of much more ambitious joint projects. What strategies are needed to cultivate such relationships? How might museum educators best take advantage of the opportunities in their own communities?

Virtual museums live on the World Wide Web . . . the Internet.

The door to the virtual museum is electronic. You drive up for a visit on the Information Highway, but you need no car. A computer and an Internet account serve as your entrance ticket and transportation combined.

A virtual museum is an organized collection of electronic artifacts and information resources - virtually anything which can be digitized. The collection may include paintings, drawings, photographs, diagrams, graphs, recordings, video segments, newspaper articles, transcripts of interviews, numerical databases and a host of other items which may be saved on the virtual museum's file server. It may also offer pointers to great resources around the world relevant to the museum's main focus.

For the purpose of this article, we will divide electronic museums into two main categories:

Learning Museums - Web sites which offer substantial online learning resources which invite many repeat visits and enable substantial investigations and exploration.

Marketing Museums - Web sites which are mainly intended as marketing vehicles and communication media to increase the number of visitors to the original physical museum by making more people aware of museum's collections and special events. Such sites may also have museum shop sales as a major goal.

This article will focus upon Learning Museums as promising ways for museums to partner with schools for the sake of expanding the reach of the museum into the community in support of continuing education. The word "community" takes on a global meaning as a regional museum such as the Whatcom Museum of History and Art can extend its collection into the farthest corners of its large county and then beyond those corners into the rest of Washington, Canada, the United States and far distant Pacific Rim countries like Singapore and Japan.

A learning museum has the following characteristics:

• The online collection is substantial.
• The content offerings are rich .
• The "lobby" or entrance is both inviting and user-friendly.
• It would take dozens of visits to explore the contents.
• The museum offers many different kinds of learning activities suited to different age levels and learning styles.
• The virtual visit increases desire for a "real time" visit to the original museum building.

In order to understand how some Learning Museums have set about meeting these demanding standards, visit some of the following models, many of which were favorably reviewed in the January/February, 1997 issue of Museum News in "Perfect Site," pages 34-40. Do any of these museums meet all six criteria?

Art Institute of Chicago
http://www.artic.edu/

The Detroit Institute of the Arts
http://www.dia.org

The Exploratorium
http://www.exploratorium.org

Franklin Institute
http://sln.fi.edu/

Minnesota Institute of the Arts
http://www.artsMIA.org

Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul
http://www.mtn.org/MMAA/exhibit/diagram.html

Museum of Modern Art
http://www.moma.org/

Museum of Science, Boston
http://www.mos.org

Mystic Seaport
http://www.mystic.org

Paleontology (California Museum of)
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibit/exhibits.html

The Thinker - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
http://www.thinker.org

United States Holocaust Museum
http://www.ushmn.org

Why Schools?
Students as Curators of Virtual Museums

Why would a school want to participate in creating Learning Museums?

And why would a school want a partnership with a museum to build such virtual museums?

Learning Museums promote active, student-centered learning along with real world problem-solving.

This is an opportunity for students to do real research.

Much of the material housed in a virtual museum may be generated and produced by students who conduct research on the topic within their own community and the global community, engaging in an electronic treasure hunt to find great information and electronic artifacts. Because students are actually building meaning as they add to the museum collection, this is, in many respects, a wonderful workshop for constructivist learning.

Museum professionals and educators are well aware of the many challenges which follow the acquisition of artifacts - challenges which make for extremely useful learning by students:

• How do we arrange and display the artifacts?
• How do we interpret the artifacts?
• How do we honor standards of accuracy and sound scholarship?
• How do we allow for different kinds of visits and visitors?

  
  

Learning Museums put students in roles which prepare them for the workplace.

Development of a museum requires working committees and assignments which parallel the problem-solving required in the adult world.

Learning Museums help to preserve local history and local treasures.

The attics of elders are often filled with trunks and photo albums that all too often end up in landfills upon their passing away. The diaries, old letters, and other relics that might help middle school students understand American life at the turn of the century or during the Civil War are frequently discarded and destroyed.

Virtual museums offer an opportunity for communities to preserve and display much of this material, while providing an opportunity for students to work on local history projects that involve collection and archiving. Instead of forcing students to learn by reading four-inch thick textbooks, a national network of such local history museums might provide students (and adults) across the nation with a rich banquet table full of primary source materials.

Learning Museums are Global

Besides the locally collected information resources, the virtual museum will also point the visitor to the best related resources that can be found on the Internet. A visitor to a Pacific Rim museum, for example, may open a page listing dozens of sites providing weather, tourist guides, economic data, and political news. Click on one of these and the visitor is on a magic carpet ride to a different file server housed, perhaps, in Korea or New York or Boise.

The beauty of a virtual museum is its capacity to connect the visitor with valuable information across the entire globe.

Students and staff, once equipped with HTML programming skills (not much harder than HyperCard), can simply cut and paste the addresses of great sites from the WWW pages created by others. These will then appear as hypertext links on museum pages.

Learning Museums are Dynamic, Multidisciplinary, and Multisensory

Unlike most school research projects, virtual museums provide persistent, ongoing "change, activity, and progress" (American Heritage Dictionary definition of "dynamic"). The collection process is never-ending. Students may continue their work over several years, and even after they leave their elementary school to begin work at the virtual museum housed at the middle school, they can return for "electronic" visits and note the expanding collection. Multi-age classes may focus upon the same challenge for several years running without fear of repetition. Students can actually see the "fruits" of their inquiry. They become "knowledge builders" rather than mere consumers.

Museums are also fine vehicles for multidisciplinary studies, as the collection may include everything from music and art to science and politics and mathematics.

Virtual museums offer multi-sensory opportunities appealing to a variety of learning styles and multiple intelligences. One can see a Picasso. One can see and hear Tori Amos perform "Cornflake Girl." Virtual museums have great advantages over textbooks - bringing vitality, color and motion to student exploration.

In the past, schooling has been too divorced from real life. The study of life through textbooks and teacher lectures was all too often a case of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Few students mistook the lessons as approaching the "real thing."

Virtual museums offer a different kind of learning - one which is fresh and vibrant.

Advantages of Partnership for Schools

• Expertise

  As schools first begin to put together museums on the World Wide Web they will rapidly recognize how much they need to learn about the work of museums. The partnership helps teachers and students learn about the complicated work which goes on behind the scenes.

  Just what contribution is made by each of the following museum staff members and which roles need to be duplicated to create a Learning Museum?

  • Curator
  • Researcher
  • Collection Manager
  • Exhibition Designer
  • Exhibition Fabricator
  • Educator
  • Public Relations
  • Fund Raiser
  • Editor
  • Graphic Designer
  • Photographer

  Students need to learn about the thoughtful display and interpretation of artifacts. How do they select and then organize the material? What is the role of words alongside images? How do museum people create exhibits around themes and issues? How can the work of museum people inform the museum building of students?

  Without the support and guidance of museum professionals, there is some danger that the museums constructed on the Web will be awkwardly amateurish and (even worse) may misrepresent facts and history, contributing to ignorance, prejudice and misunderstanding rather than the reverse.

  The challenge of communicating accurately and sensitively about historical events is immense for the adult museum professionals such as those who created the controversial Hiroshima exhibit for the Smithsonian and those who have encountered serious anger from Native American groups which have protested the display of tribal treasures.

  School people have much to learn from their museum partners about the job of sharing treasures with the world.

• Resources

  Schools can often find many excellent sources of material for virtual museums locally, but for particular topics such as local history, the museum may be the main holder of copyright. In those cases, it may be very difficult to proceed with a virtual museum unless the copyright holder agrees to share those rights by permitting some scanning of photographs and documents or photographing of objects.

  Most museums can display only a portion of the artifacts and treasures which have been collected or bequeathed. Large portions of the collection may never meet the public eye.

  As part of the charge of museums is the preservation of treasures, the prospect of broadcasting images on a global network can be a threatening thought at first, but thorough exploration and review of those issues can lead to some satisfying strategies which preserve and share at the same time.

Why Would Museums Partner?
Art, Science and Natural History Museums
Living Museums

Why would museums want to build Learning Museums on the Web instead of relying upon and limiting themselves to Marketing Museums ?

And why would museums elect to create partnerships with schools?

• Learning Museums extend the reach of collections housed in physical museum buildings to geographically distant areas of the world whose people might would otherwise never see or appreciate the treasures contained therein.
• Learning Museums deepen the value and increase the likelihood of a physical visit by providing prospective visitors an opportunity to study parts of the collection in advance. Visit preparation enhances the actual visit as people come "primed" for viewing and learning.
• Learning Museums provide virtual visitors with many different options as to how they might experience the collection. They may change the sequence and nature of their visit to match personal preferences and learning styles.

  Visit a traditional art museum and you must generally experience the paintings as they are hung, side by side with neighboring paintings which have been selected by the museum. In a virtual museum, you may change the paintings around so that you can view all of the Mary Cassatts together or can pair Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings with her husband, Alfred Steiglitz's photographs, a rare but occasional possibility in the physical museum world. (In 1993, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. launched a joint O'Keeffe-Steiglitz collection, called "Two Lives: A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs.")

  A strong case for Learning Museums was made by Humanities and Arts on the Information Highways: A Profile (Summer 1994) - http://far.mit.edu/diig/Related/arts.txt

  Quoting from the report:

  Public Benefits of the Humanities
  and the Arts in an Information Age

  Reshaping humanities and arts information for distribution over electronic networks can provide many dividends, among them the following:

  • Enriching a sense of community through active participation in a networked environment.
  • Improving the quality of teaching and learning.
  • Fostering intellectual and artistic collaborations that will result in new resources in the arts and humanities.
  • Preserving the full complexities and quality of cultural information for the use of future generations while making it accessible to more people today.

  If the NII were to offer access to everything found in the nation's libraries, museums, theaters, auditoriums, and archives, it could help dissolve the boundaries that now separate communities, social classes, people of different economic levels, the highly educated and the broad public, and the peoples of different nations. Networks and new multimedia formats for information can reverse current inequities in access to resources.

• A School Partnership can provide smaller, non-technologically advanced museums with expertise in the area of Web site development and World Wide Web publishing if the schools have taken a leadership position in that area. In some cases the technology possessed by the school will be considerably further developed than that of a regional museum.
• A School Partnership can deepen and extend the work of museum educators, establishing ongoing repeated contacts between museum staff and school staff which takes museum-related learning to levels well beyond those possible when relying upon occasional annual visits.

  This possibility has been a driving force behind a statewide initiative in Illinois . . .

  Museums in the Classroom is a Learning Technology Initiative of the Illinois State Board of Education.

  Quoting from the project Web page:

  In this initiative the ISBE is partnering with eight Illinois museums (or consortia of museums) to provide on-line access to museum artifacts, fine arts and histories. The museums involved in this project are partnered with a total of 200 classrooms (25 classrooms with each museum group) in order to bring students, artists, scientists, curators, educators, keepers, and technicians together to explore the issues of interest to the students.

  Students from the classrooms visit the museums to image objects from the museums' collections and to work with museum personnel. Students are also video-conferencing with museum personnel from their classrooms. The on-line presentation of the student-constructed projects will be presented with a "kid spin" on both context and significance.

• A School Partnership can lead to substantial funding opportunities and benefits for both sides as the projects will qualify for funding under quite a few new grant programs emerging from Washington and various state governments. The Institute for Museum Services (http://www.ims.fed.us/imsprograms.html) offers grants for museum-school partnerships and the Department of Education (http://www.ed.gov/money.html#gc) offers very large technology programs such as the Challenge Grants which always encourage partnerships.
• A School Partnership can create new energy and promote innovative ideas about the mission and meaning of schools and museums in an Age of Information. Both institutions have held a certain grip upon information resources for a long time which is being challenged by the arrival of new information technologies. While these changes seem threatening to some schools and museums, judging from the e-mail exchanges on various listservs, it is apparent that proactive leadership can turn risk into opportunity.

  Cross organizational partnerships have a way of provoking "out of the box" thinking and innovative programs.

• A School Partnership can provide thousands of hours of excellent voluntary support for the transfer and digitization of visual materials. The skills required to scan images for computer display and the skills to develop Web pages are well within the grasp of many young people who would find such work interesting and enlightening. As museums have a long history of working well with volunteers of various kinds, this aspect of partnership should be especially appealing when facing the awesome challenge of digitizing tens of thousands of documents or photographs.

  It should be noted, of course, that most museums will have some concern about standards and professionalism which must be met when considering the use of student volunteers.

Building the Partnership:
Chronology

• In February of 1994, the Bellingham community voted to approve a $ 6 million technology bond for the local schools.
• In the summer of 1994, the schools began installation of a WAN (Wide Area Network) which would ultimately link more than 1500 computers across 18 schools all tied to the Internet.
• During the 1994-95 school year, the schools engaged in much staff development and exploration of new possibilities, leading to the creation of school Web sites in more than half the schools in the Spring. Looking for ways to develop and publish meaningful content while challenging students to construct meaning, the schools seized upon virtual museums as a primary strategy.
• In April and May of 1995, the schools developed a staff development class to show teachers how to develop an online "virtual museum" and the Director of Technology began meeting with the Director of the Whatcom Museum of History and Art to develop a partnership. Check out the lessons. (http://www.bham.wednet.edu/outline.htm)
• In October of 1995, half a dozen museum professionals participated in the Virtual Museums class and began learning Web site development. By joining in a class with 20 teachers, the museum professionals were able to share their expertise while learning of the teachers' plans. The informal exchange of ideas was an important first step in the development of the partnership.
• During that school year, the district created several online museums, none of which required resources from the Whatcom Museum, but plans began forming for a local history museum, The Fairhaven Turn of the Century Museum (http://wwwfms.bham.wednet.edu/lobby.htm), which would focus upon the 1890s and would require permissions to use the Whatcom Museum's excellent collection of photographs and other documents.
• In the Spring, the city government provided space for the Whatcom Museum (http://www.city-govt.ci.bellingham.wa.us/museum.htm) on its Web site. The pages are primarily informational.
• In June of 1996, the Whatcom Museum and the Bellingham Schools applied for an IMS grant to fund the development of two virtual museums: one built by students at the Fairhaven Middle School with assistance from the Whatcom Museum, the other a more substantial, professionally constructed virtual museum which would share more of the collection with the community. The grant included a good deal of money to purchase computers for the Whatcom Museum.
• At the close of the school year, a team of 8 teachers and 34 students spent a week creating the basic structure for The Fairhaven Turn of the Century Museum with the support of an intern in graphics arts and the generous permission of the Whatcom Museum to scan and publish documents. The museum was opened to the public.
• In August, 1996, the Whatcom Museum learned the grant request has not been successful. New sources of funding were sought.
• Work on the student built museum proceeded as biographies and historical information were developed and added throughout the Fall of 1996.
• In January, 1997, both partners continued to seek funding to expand their joint efforts.

Go to Part Two of this Article

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