Designing Web-Based Training: How to Teach Anyone Anything Anywhere Anytime

13.2. MUSEUMS

A museum is an organized collection of exhibits gathered in one place. Exhibits consist of informative objects, such as paintings by van Gogh and sculpture by Rodin, annotated with relevant facts. A Web-based museum is much the same, except that the place where objects are gathered is not a building made of granite and marble but a linked set of Web pages.

Virtual museums have been used to showcase objects as diverse as human organs, paintings by a second-grade class, and airsickness bags. In this section, we will explore the kinds of virtual museums that a corporation or training group might set up.

Web-based museums are also called virtual museums, e-museums, virtual galleries, online museums, and online galleries.

This example shows a small museum of minerals. It contains pictures of minerals and information about them.

Here in the virtual gallery, visitors see small images of the minerals and their names. A visitor can pick a mineral by appearance or by name to jump to the exhibit of that mineral.

The individual exhibit shows a single mineral. It also provides technical details about the mineral along with a brief description of it.

The Next and Previous buttons take the visitor forward and backward through all the minerals in the museum. The Graze button starts ...