The Bear Flag Museum

The Bear Flag Museum is dedicated to the state flag of California.

This online museum has a variety of content related to the state flag. They include historical images, contemporary artwork, historical quotes and chronology of the flag, flag trivia, and rules and statutes for flying the flag. This digital collection is a museum online only, the website is based on the inspiration of California resident Bill Trenkel. This "museum" doesn't have any actual physical holdings.
The gallery section contains a variety of images: various versions of the flag, maps, political cartoons, photographs, etc. The quality of some of these images is not very good, and there's no option to further enlarge the image or zoom in. The purpose of the galleries seems to be merely to provide images for the slideshow on the homepage. The graphics section contains selected artwork from a featured artist. These images are at least larger in size, and therefore are able to show more detail in the artwork.

The metadata for the gallery images is weak, it's sort of hit or miss. Some images list a description, date, and dimenstions, other images merely list a title or the website address of where the image came from. "Item for sale on EBay" is the only info listed at all for several of the images. The artwork in the graphics section has better metadata, listing the title, year, dimensions, and the mediums used to create the art.

This website is very user friendly for the general public. Anyone curious about the California state flag would find this website an interesting resource. Anyone wanting to do serious research would need to take advantage of the bibliography and links provided on the website.