Museum of London: 1920's

In 2004, The Museum of London curated “1920s: The Decade that Changed London.” The objects in the exhibition came from nearly 40 different museums and collections. The content is interesting but the site itself is clearly an early example of museum digitization projects. The curators separated the content into 8 themes. After selecting a theme you are sent to a page with a brief overview on the topic and then you must follow another link to get to the actual images which are split into even more categories. The benefit of this approach is probably to make sure that viewers are contextualizing what they see but it makes it more difficult and time-consuming to navigate the page.

Each image is given a moderate amount of metadata as well as a paragraph explaining the context and history of an item. The exhibit includes portraits of celebrities, pieces of clothing, new technology from the decade and political pamphlets. The images themselves may be enlarged once when you click on them but are not interactive in any way. For example, an image of a hat will only show it from one angle. For a museum project the layout and content make sense but could benefit from an updated look and layout.