On(or over the)line

A number of major museums have re-vamped their websites recently, notably the V&A, British Museum, and National Maritime Museum. In some cases this was long-needed. I have long found the National Maritime Museum website counter-intuitive and confusing. The re-vamp has been part of a complete re-brand, attempting to make the mission of the three buildings that the NMM comprises (the maritime galleries, Royal Observatory, and Queen’s House) clearer and to tie them together with a common set of imagery.

All three websites are now stylish and trendy, with large banners featuring images of objects, and lengthy pages divided into grids of stories and information. Most navigation has moved to the bottom of the pages. All feature more interactive elements for virtual visitors to engage with the collections, the staff and the buildings. All feature a simpler text-style, greater access to online ticket sales and shopping and, it would seem, more content in general. So far, so good.

Yet, I am unclear what these revamps have actually added to the visitor experience, apart from making the websites look newer and more fashionable. In most cases these lengthy grids of content are more complicated to read and navigate. I now find it harder to find the collections online sections, which should surely be the point of any of these websites. If they are to create a virtual museum for the visitor, collections online should be at the heart of these. Newer media elements such as blogs, news films and interviews should enhance rather than detracting from the collections, which at the moment, sadly, is what they seem to do.

I learnt at the conference in Germany, mentioned in my last post, about a wonderful collections online project that has been established by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, in the Netherlands. This gives the visitor, through a website, access not only to 360° images of all the objects, complete with detailed information, but presents these within the eighteenth-century setting which the museum still boasts. Thus you navigate via the case and shelf arrangements to each object, losing less of the historic experience than in a standard collections online offering. Yet, this incredible resource is hard to find and is not linked at all prominently to the main museum site. This seems indicative of the broader problems with how new museum websites relate to their key content: their collections.