Jesse Saunders Blog #10: America on the Move

America on the Move | Home Page

The "American On The Move" exhibit of digitized materials is hosted by, and is largely assembled with materials from, the National Museum of American History. This exhibit depicts the history of American transportation; and while it focuses largely on the effect of the automobile, there are also discussion of 19th century transportation, as well as modern container shipping and air travel.

Selection Decisions
The exhibit website does not contain an implicit information regarding how materials were selected to be digitized; however, given that this was an installed exhibit at the museum, and the inclusion of a broken link at the bottom of each page leading the viewer to "Buy The Book", it would appear that the materials in this exhibit were selected due to their inclusion in the exhibit and book (both money making prospects), with the web exhibit being a side-project.

Metadata
Although the number of objects contained in the collection is quite large, there is relatively little metadata for each image. The amount of metatdata assembled for each image depends largely on the contents of that image. Print materials, photographs, etc. appear to generally contain information regarding date, location, format, original holding repository, etc. However, photographs of physical objects, particularly museum exhibits, contain only information regarding year of production and producer. In addition to standard metadata, each image page also contains links to the sections of the exhibit in which they are used, as well as links to 'suggested' items which may also be of interest.


Object Characteristics
The images in this collection are displayed using jpg images with medium resolution on their individual pages. There appears to be no way to download high-res copies of the images. The mateirals used in the exhibition itself was produced with Flash, and therefore cannot be saved or used in any way offline by users of the site.


Intended Audience
The intended audience for this exhibit would most likely be largely culled from recent or future visitors to the exhibit. The exhibit could be used by teachers in the area of American or technological history as the museum does provide several learning resources for families/teachers/etc.