Online Titanic Museum

“The Online Titanic Museum is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Titanic; her twin sisters Olympic and Britannic and the White Star Line - the shipping line that owned and operated the three "Olympic Class" steamers.This website is a virtual display of my private collection of authentic Titanic related artifacts and memorabilia.”

While generally easy to navigate, the website, as a whole, seems unprofessionally done and is old-fashioned looking. Calling the site a “museum,” in my mind, is a stretch.

Since the digitized materials are a private enthusiast’s collection, rather than from a museum’s holdings, I’m lead to believe that everything the unnamed collector possesses is digitized for the website. The materials themselves are not particularly exhaustive in regard to the history of the Titanic. Many are just “related” items, reproductions, or posters advertising Titanic museum exhibits. I’d imagine that the collector digitizes and posts whatever he picks up at auctions, as he exhorts the viewer: “The collection is constantly growing so be sure to check back often!”

The metadata, while present and certainly better than no data whatsoever, is generally lacking. Sometimes the collector will add a date the material was created, an auction purchase date, and provenance, but this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. All items are at least accompanied by a non-professional sounding blurb, vaguely explaining what the item is and its possible significance.

The materials are initially viewed as uniform 120 x 95px thumbnails. Clicking on the thumbnail augments the image, but not drastically. The enlarged images are not particularly impressive at about 300 x 300 pixels each. They cannot be enlarged any further. The images are generally of poor quality: colors are dull, the images are often too dark, and hardly any detail can be seen. I’d imagine these were scanned by a layman using an out-of-date or inexpensive machine, or photographed in poor lighting conditions with a point-and-shoot digital camera.

The intended audience is almost certainly non-professional, lay historians with an interest in the history of the Titanic disaster. The website was created in 1998, during the craze for the movie “Titanic” which was released that year. The collector probably wished to cash in a bit on the renewed public interest generated by the film, as indicated by the ads at the bottom of the home page, and the prominently featured link to its CafePress Titanic-themed apparel store.