*** From the Archives ***

This article is from September 17, 2001, and is no longer current.

Great Sites: A Metaphoric Stroll Through the Shelburne Museum

Situated on the shore of Lake Champlain on 45 acres of Vermont’s verdant Champlain Valley, the Shelburne Museum offers an ideal setting for its collection of New England folk art, paintings, and historical memorabilia. The 37 buildings that make up the museum are best toured in person, but the museum’s Web site does an admirable job of giving visitors a feel for the museum and what it offers.

Many sites purport to provide a “virtual tour” of the facility they represent, but these efforts seldom succeed in giving visitors any sort of feel for the physical site. The immediacy of the actual place is notoriously difficult to replace. Though hardly pretending to match the experience of visiting the Shelburne Museum in person, its Web site does manage to guide browsers around and through Shelburne’s sizable location, as something of an online preview if nothing else.
The introductory page, www.shelburnemuseum.org, establishes the guidelines for an exploration of the grounds. It begins with the hierarchical site navigation, which is placed in a bar at the top with the Museum’s logo (see below): The Museum, Education, Museum Store, and Facilities Rentals. At the end of the bar are the non-hierarchical links: Visit Us, Join Us, and three icons for Calendar, Contact, and Grounds.

In a column at the left are more temporal links: This Month, New Exhibits, Special Events, and Hours and Rates. Except for the initial link to This Month’s Calendar, the other links establish a secondary hierarchy within the division entitled The Museum. There are also featured links in the main content area of the page, in this case for a Grandma Moses exhibition and The Collector’s House.
These horizontal and vertical, hierarchical and non-hierarchical links establish a typical site navigation scheme. But there’s another way to explore this domain. The main content area lies in the middle of the home page, enclosed by links on all sides. It features a four-square college, which provides a metaphorical window into the museum. First you see an aerial view of the lawns and buildings in greenest summer. If you remain on the page long enough without making other selections, the panes fade, leaving one pane highlighted to focus on one attraction of the museum: Folk Art, Painting, Ticonderoga, or Historic Architecture. The highlighting cycles slowly through the four squares automatically to describe each collection, or you can flip through them yourself simply by moving the mouse over the squares.

Clicking on a highlighted square leads to the main organizing theme of this online museum view, a quadrant map of the facility.


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  • anonymous says:

    Kudos

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