Museum of Science & Industry's Genetics: Decoding Life

At Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, there is a long-standing, large exhibit called Genetics: Decoding Life. It is sponsored by the Pritzker Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Abbott Laboratories Fund. The website is visually very appealing (futuristic!) and high in interaction. Each physical/topic area of the exhibit (e.g., Cloning, Mutations, Development, etc.) are different tabs on the side of the website. These tabs remain there no matter which area of interest is selected, thus making browsing a breeze. However, content-wise, the website is rather shallow. Rather than being comprehensive, the website only goes in-depth for specific creatures (e.g. "Elderly Worms," "A School for Flies," "Green-Eyed Frogs") in order to illustrate scientific concepts.


The website for the exhibit includes Quicktime videos. They require at least Quicktime 4.0. All of the files are fairly small at 1.4 to 2.6MB, and it shows with the rather grainy quality of the videos and the small screen size. I imagine this is because the museum wants the videos to be accessible to as many people as possible without requiring fast internet connections. An example of one of these videos can be seen here. The videos are very much mini-documentaries, with short interviews and scientists at work.

In addition to the short Quicktime videos, there are also slightly longer ones of the 2002 genetics symposia. While the former videos have no metadata, these videos are available on a website of a different design and include some metadata relating to the symposia. The metadata given includes the name and date of the symposium, the speaker in the video, whether the video is an excerpt or not, moderators, keynote speakers, panelists, and so forth.



This website is very much geared to getting people to the museum. Each topic of interest features a tour of the physical exhibit that includes bullet points of things to do/see/learn if you actually go there: "Visit the chick hatchery," "See cloned mice and find out how and why scientists are studying cloning," etc. Interestingly, unlike many online exhibitions, this website's photos are not separate from the background. In other words, if the JPG is saved, it is like the image above (481 x 429 pixels). The only thing missing are the buttons on the left side that allow the user to go to other parts of the exhibition.