Gallery/Museum

Cognitive Constructivism: Information Banks: Gallery/Museum

Electronic gallery/musuem can be used in much the same way as printed guide for gallery/musuem, with the added benefits of electronic support for organizing, copying, and printing material from them. Electronic gallery/musuem have the added advantage of offering more than text and illustrations. Most also have movies, sound, and audio. When you want to conduct a research on Mercury using NASA's web-based Photo Gallery, for example, you can view a QuickTime movie on Mercury instead of just reading description about Mercury.

The examples below illustrate some of the types of electronic gallery/musuem available today. Galleries/museums discussed below are specialized publications. They deal with one particular topic. For example, the Motor Museum deals with automobiles, Le Grand Louvre has information on the Louvre collection, and the NASA Photo Gallery houses space-related pictures and videos. Expect to see many more specialized electronic gallery/musuem in the near future.

Le Grand Louvre

The Louvre in Paris is one of the most famous museums in the world; it houses the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace as well as other masterpieces from all of Europe. It houses Italian Renaissance art, ancient Egyptian art, and Roman and Greek art. A popular web site on paintings collected in the Louvre is the Le Grand Louvre. This web site presents art in the Louvre Museum. Some links on the Le Grand Louvre web site offer visitors a brief history of the Louvre and also includes a gallery containing some of the most famous works it houses with a brief discussion of each work.

From the next web page a visitor may choose to have a closer look at a selection of artistic works.

For example, click on The Mona Lisa, the following information is displayed along with the painting:

The paint of this portrait has oxidized and is seen through a greenish haze, which alters the original colors. It is believed that da Vinci used a secret mixture of turpentine, white lead, linseed oil, and varnish.

The figure is in three-quarter profile, with hands together, and the arm of the chair at a slant. The corners of her mouth and eyes fit into the same circle and make you look constantly from one to the other. Her eyes follow you around the room, moving as if by magic.

Leonardo da Vinci brought the painting from Italy to Paris when Francis I summoned him to the French court, and da Vinci lived there for the remainder of his life.

URL: http://www.altcom.net/~psmith/Louvre/

The NASA Photo Gallery

Photo and data imagery collections from six NASA Centers have been linked together on this Web site to create a searchable database of imagery covering a variety of NASA programs. This Photo Gallery is a step toward a comprehensive online imagery collection. Each Shuttle mission produces 2000 to 5000 photographic images. Over 250,000 images have been captured, digitized, and stored.

This large collection includes press release and earth observation images and many other images from the manned space program from Mercury to the present. These images can be accessed using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and World Wide Web over the Internet. Each of these protocols will provide access to NASA's high quality images in JPEG and GIF formats (average 40k each) and the detailed captions files that describe them.

For example, the next screen displays the ADEOS.GIF animation of low ozone over the North Pole in March 1997. The image changes every second to simulate the time progresses.

The next screen is the NSSDC Photo Gallery collection on Mercury. This mosaic of Mercury was taken by the Mariner 10 spacecraft during its approach on 29 March 1974. The mosaic consists of 18 images taken at 42 s intervals during a 13 minute period when the spacecraft was 200,000 km (about 6 hours prior to closest approach) from the planet.

Click on one of the thumbnails of Mercury and you will get a full screen picture of Mercury as shown on the next screen.

The next screen is the table of content of NASA's multimedia collection. It tells viewers the content, as well as the file formats (many are in QuickTime Movies and MPEG formats), and file sizes of the items.

URL: http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/

100 Years of Motoring

100 Years of Motoring is an electronic museum of motors. This CD presents the collection in the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, England. The Motor Museum has an extensive collection of cars, auto memorabilia, motor cycles, and a library of technical innovations, so that visitors can study the effect that the motor cars has had on our lives.

You can visit the electronic museum in different tours. This next screen is the starting point of the visitors' journey. There are many "hot spots" on this picture. For example, click on one of the meters on the dashboard and you will see the history of motors, click on the map and you will see the library of motors.

If you do not like to guess where a click on the one of the "hot spots" will link you to, a click on the signpost will displayed the signpost in full screen and tell you where you are going in plain text.

Each sign on the signpost emphasizes a different topic: driving seat, workshop, museum library, and exit. A click on workshop will display the next screen.

Click on the "show all system" button will give you different choices such as brakes and engines.
Different parts of the car will be highlighted as different topics are chosen. For example, the brakes turn yellow on the following anatomy of the car to indicate the location of the brakes in a car.

Some topics are so big that the program uses several more screen to explain the content. For example, the anatomy of an engine as shown on next screen is displayed to explain engines in details. All of the "boxes" on the screen are clickable "hot spots".

As you move around the electronic museum, very good images are displayed on the screen. The signpost is included in every single screen to help with user navigation. Click on the signpost anytime, and the signpost will be enlarged to serve as a tour guide.

To try out this trial program, you must install it on your computer's hard drive. To do that you must copy the folder called motoring to your hard drive. That folder is on the CD-ROM in the subdirectory called programs/motoring/. You might create a subdirectory on your computer named EDSoft (only if you do not already have one). Then you could copy motoring into the EDSoft subdirectory. Once you have copied motoring over to your hard drive you can use the standard Windows procedure to install that program by clicking on install.exe in the EDSoft/motoring/ folder on your hard drive. Then follow the directions on the screen.

Click here to know more about installation.

Additional Information

Museums and other exhibits On the Internet

As the name indicates, this web page provides links to museums and other exhibits on the Internet.

URL: http://www.crc.ricoh.com/people/steve/kids.html#museums

Microsoft Art Gallery

Click on the link to view a description of Microsoft Art Gallery CD-ROM.

Return to Homepage
Return to Cognitive Constructivist Theories