Museum Website Evaluation

I first came across the New Media Museumfrom an email thread. A alum of SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board at MIT, was “Looking to find a new home for a piece of computing history…” with a working Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. One of the suggestions on the thread was this museum, which has its collections are stored in the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse near campus.

The New Media Museum does not have a permanent location for the moment, and the website reflects this. While being an unassuming Wordpress template website, it’s straight to the point. This is a virtual museum, that acknowledges its presence in mediums such as Toy Worlds, a 3D diorama, and SecondLife. In some ways, the impermanent and digtal state of the New Media Museum made it pandemic-proof. It leans into the restraints of staying at home in the pandemic and makes an effort to give virtual visit options where it lives. Some exhibits temporarily displayed at other events are shown in pages under the Exhibits tab, but acknowledged as the past.

In terms of recources, its collections pages link to and contain image examples from the collection, resources that could be a good jumping off point for education. The footnotes also acknowledges that many of these resources overlap with 21L.015 Introduction to Media Studies (MIT, 1998). But in ways itself, the New Museum offers a small experimental example of what a virtual museum space is.