The Mariner's Museum operates an online educational resource titled Exploration Through the Ages. This online museum offers visitors information regarding exploration from ancient to modern times. It was funded by a grant from The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences. The site itself looks very professional, is easy navigable, and well organized. A user can search for a specific item, or browse through curated collections of material on specific explorers, vessels, voyages, and exploration tools. There are also curated exhibits on early exploration, the exchange of culture, life at sea, mapmaking, travel writing. This is an attempt to create a museum in virtual space.
Each specific explorer has a sort of hub through which a user may access images and further pertinent data--like what ships they used or where they went at what time. There is also an interesting article regarding each explorer. The images that accompany these hubs are themselves are jpegs, and cannot be enlarged more than once. The scans are of reasonably good quality, and are accompanied by a variety of helpful metadata including title, source, date, and information about the finding aid used at the instution where the item resides.
This website appears to have been designed with educators in mind, as it is clearly constructed with teachers in mind. To this end, there is a teacher survey link on the front page of the website. This resource seems like it would be excellent for high school or advanced middle school students. It is not really suitable for college or graduate level scholarly work, but does provide value in terms of listed bibliographies for each topic. I would reccomend this site to anyone teaching high school history or individuals casually interested in maritime history or exploration.
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