Lauren A Blog 3: Young Henry VIII Virtual Tour

The Young Henry VIII virtual exhibit was created by Hampton Court Palace as an online surrogate of a permanent exhibit in the palace's Wolsey rooms. The exhibit is part of a program to open up previously hidden areas of Hampton Court in celebration of the 500th anniversary of Great Harry's accession to the throne. The exhibition is set in restored palace rooms and includes historic paintings and hands-on displays. Hampton Court is owned by the British royal family, but is preserved and operated by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that also looks after the Tower of London.

Collection Principles

The online exhibition's goal seems to be to give website visitors an experience very close to that of the actual Young Henry exhibit on the palace tour. All rooms and exhibit objects are included, excepting audio-visual materials. The exhibition contrasts the well-known stories of the "fat, tyrannical" ruler (they use those exact words A LOT) with the young, dashing prince and king Henry VIII was while married to Katherine of Aragon and closely advised by Thomas Wolsey. Materials seem to have been selected based on their relationship to these three people and the first 20 years of Henry's reign.

Object Characteristics

The online tour consists of 8 flash pages, one for each room. The tour is linear; there is no going back to the previous room for another look. Each “room” is a 360-degree still image taken from a center point in the room. This allows the visitor to look at all the walls, as well as the ceiling and floor, but does not allow the visitor to change position. This causes problems as some materials are displayed on the floor below where the cameraperson was standing. Additionally, the visitor cannot change their vantage point or avoid the glare of lighting and windows on a painting by moving around the room. The viewer can, however, control the camera's movement and zoom in on objects. As the camera touches on important objects such as paintings, ceiling details and furniture in the room, information about the object's historic significance appears at the bottom of the screen. Paintings can be clicked to open up a digital image, thus avoiding glare or other distortions, but losing the experience of “being in” the palace. The individual images can be saved to a computer hard drive as JPEGs. In this separate window it is also possible to zoom into the objects further.

Metadata

Absolutely no information is given about the digital objects, this includes the flash tour and the digital photographs of the artwork. The artists’ names are listed, along with their birth and death dates and the work's title. A few paragraphs about the artwork's subject and history are also presented. There is no way to search the tour, digital images or image information.

Audience

The site seems geared mostly toward stirring up tourism at Hampton Court. As it states, “our ambition is to make the palace the place to come and learn about Henry VIII in 2009 – and beyond” (the italics are mine). Additionally, the site’s extremely slow loading time, even on my very fast broadband, indicates to me that it would not provide much access to the millions of people worldwide who will never make it to the actual palace. The digital tour is just that, a tour of the rooms, it does not attempt to be a digital collection, which is good, because it most certainly would not succeed.