Memorial Hall Museum

This week, I looked at the digital collection of the Memorial Hall Museum in Massachusetts, which is basically a digital overview of the typical artifacts and other items contained in the museum collection.

Selection Decisions: The purpose of this digital collection is to highlight the kinds of items housed in the museum. Therefore, since it is partly a tool for getting potential visitors interested in the museum, they have chosen their most valued or interesting items for digital display. In this case, value is based on artifacts relevant to famous New England people, places and events, as well as items that are representative of an era or a special collection within the museum.

Metadata: Each item has a chart that provides detailed information about the physical item, such as date, artist, subject, size, location, material. They also provide an exhibit-style description of each item, providing historical and cultural context. This is useful for telling us what is in the Memorial Hall Museum’s collection, it does not help with utilizing the digital object. While information about the physical item is fully documented, this resource is sadly lacking in technical metadata. There is no information about the digitization project and the technology used, and there is no way to know the specifics of the digital object. This is one situation where we can see that this collection is obviously meant to get the patron into the museum and nothing more.

Digital Object Characteristics: Relating to the fact that technical metadata is missing, the digital objects are of generally poor quality. While some photographs are displayed clearly, it is impossible to enlarge the image at all. Images of physical artifacts are much worse, displayed as poorly-formatted photographs of the item from only one angle. This (primary) area of the digital collection could definitely use some improvement.

Intended Audience: As I’ve mentioned above, this site is not meant to be a primary research source. Rather, it is intended as a tool for generating interest in the physical collections at the museum and inspiring visits in person. Therefore, the intended audience is the general population looking to visit the museum, rather than a scholarly researcher. This would be a good tool for showing a researcher an overview of the museum’s collection, but using the collection for research still requires a physical trip to the museum.