Cschley Blog 10 Henry Ford Museum “A Colonial family and Community”

Structured as an interactive investigation, “A Colonial Family and Community” exhibit invites the visitor to be a history detective, go back in time and investigate the daily lives of the Daggetts, a colonial family from northeastern Connecticut, collect clues to uncover answers to 7 questions about colonial life in the 1700s, and then prove your skills as a history detective by discovering "What's wrong with this picture?"

Collection Principles. This online exhibit is one of the SmartFun Online exhibits of The Henry Ford Museum of Detroit and is an interactive classroom resource for teachers, media specialists, and students using images, objects, and documents from the collections of The Henry Ford. Entering from a map of Connecticut, the Daggetts are described in text that includes links to maps and documents in the Museum’s collection. The 7 questions posed include excerpts from Samuel Daggett’s account book, pen and ink drawings, newspapers, broadsides, and links to video clips in Quicktime (with no audio), or links to images with only audio, and descriptive text in the correct answer to the posed question (an incorrect answer gently suggests that the user try again!). At the end of the answer, you are instructed to return to the original map for the subsequent questions. At the end of the series of questions and its accompanying text music plays while you are congratulated on being a super-sleuth while you are advised that “By investigating the Daggett family and the community in which they lived, you have connected with real people and places from colonial times. You've learned about people of the past in the same way that historians and museum curators do--by examining accounts from the time period through authentic documents, account books, newspapers and illustrations.”

Object Characteristics. The videos on each question page are presented in Quicktime which must be uploaded, but when the film is downloaded, the resulting window only shows the video in small, almost thumbnail size which is difficult to view. Only the newspaper, ads, and broadside image documents from the Museum’s collections can be opened for enlargement. They are in jpeg format only. No images of pages from the Daggett account book are accessible except for the initial description of the book on the site’s first welcoming page.

Metadata. Sadly, very little! Only the text portions on the initial welcoming page and the seven question and answering pages provide any descriptive information about the Daggett Colonial family and their life. There is no metadata other than a simple title description for each of the images provided, although the newspaper and broadside images are self explanatory by their title and date. There are links for further print and online resources for students and teachers and separate materials for teachers that include curriculum standards, but only when accessed by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page to Smart Fun Online. Other than a copyright notice for “The Henry Ford” and a disclaimer that it is a museum complex separate and unaffiliated with Ford Motor Company and the Ford Foundation, there is no administrative metadata or reference to rights with respect to the images or the documents they represent.

Intended Audience. This exhibit is geared to the elementary or middle school teacher and student. Although the introduction to the site mentions media specialists as having an interest in the site, the presentation of information is not particularly sophisticated in its video images without audio accompaniment and thus likely not of interest to most media specialists.