We live in the digital age. The age of information, accessibility and innovation. These three components are especially relevant to the release of new virtual exhibits for Centretown’s museums. Historical information, trivia, videos and pictures of artifacts are all available at the click of a mouse.
Yes, this is innovative. Yes, it is important to digitize and ensure the preservation of collections. And yes, it’s critical to appeal and be accessible to a wider audience in the technology era. But we must not forget that while this advance can be beneficial, there is simply no replacement to physically visiting a museum.
Museums and heritage sites are extremely important educational tools, no matter how one chooses to visit and interact with them. If anything, physical and digital exhibits should go hand in hand, and may provide a richer experience for the visitor who chooses to explore both.
The Canadian Museum of Nature recently launched an exhibit about the Arctic, targeted specifically at youth. The Canadian War Museum has 19 online exhibits and its staff is currently working on adapting them to the 100th anniversary of the First World War.
Though it’s significantly smaller, the Bytown Museum has two online exhibits and is in the process of digitizing its entire collection.
The Canadian War Museum’s annual report indicates that 451,000 people physically visited the museum in 2012 – 2013. It may seem like a high number, but it’s rather insignificant compared to the 791,000 that visited the online New France exhibit, for example.
And it’s a small fraction of the nearly 13 million who visited the museum’s various web exhibits and multimedia during that time.
The Canadian Museum of Nature set a target of 475,000 visitors in 2012 – 2013. It received 375,000, according to its annual report.
It’s incredible that the museums are accessible to Canadians from coast to coast. These are national museums after all and it’s certainly demanding (and unrealistic) to encourage those who aren’t from Ottawa to travel here to experience heritage sites.
But museums in Centretown are not quite hitting their attendance targets, and while digital resources are advantageous, they should not detract from efforts to get Ottawans to visit a museum in person. Indeed, there are certain things that can only truly be experienced upon entering the doors of a museum.
For one, the recently renovated war museum is designed to look and feel like a bunker. The exhibits enhance the visitor’s knowledge about Canada’s participation in various wars while also making them feel as though they were a part of them – you can enter very realistic looking trenches, try on a soldier’s uniform, endure physical army tests, and walk through a room filled with restored war-era tanks, automobiles and airplanes.
The Museum of Nature is located in a historical building and features diverse exhibits containing more than 100 million specimens that have been accumulated over 150 years. Given the choice, it can only be assumed that interacting with these exhibits and specimens is preferable to simply clicking through pictures of them online.
There are more than 20 museums in the Ottawa area, three of them located in Centretown. You can bet that 20 museums contain an abundance of resources on Canada’s history and culture.
Some of these resources are reflected digitally, and others can only truly be understood if one attends the museum. Both are relevant in this day and age. Let’s encourage museums and heritage sites any way we can, and remember that part of their importance comes from physically interacting with exhibits.