As my interests lie in the discipline of Art History, I decided to check out a few art museum websites. First, I looked at the National Museum for Women in the Arts museum located here in Washington, D.C. www.nmwa.org The site definitely seems to be geared to the potential visitor, as the vast majority of its navigation bar is devoted to calendars, events, exhibitions, etc. It is only obliquely relevant to a student or scholar, as some of the material in their collection is well documented and searchable on the site, but not all or even a great amount of it. For example, I searched Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, a Progressive Era American sculptor that I had previously researched elsewhere. Although there was one record of one small sculpture in their collection, there was little to no additional information available on provenance, exhibition history, not even the artist’s bio or related works. For the scholar or student, the site provides little information about the collection, and the image quality is often poor.
Another interesting aspect of this site is its promotion of its gallery space for corporate and private events. The museum is a private entity, not federally funded, as the Smithsonian is. It has to push for private funding, and the NMWA site is definitely used to solicit non-conventional use of its space to bring in more funding for the museum outside of membership. Note that they also host a brunch. This brings up more questions about the museum’s directed audience, and the assumptions made about it. (Do the potential visitors there have a propensity to like mimosas and eggs benedict? Hmm..) Either way, the site functions as both educational and commercial. It could definitely use some revamping in terms of design, but that’s another week (Wow, that lavender is really gross).
I also tried to see how simple it was to search for employment opportunities and internships, and this was a little tricky as well. There isn’t any link in the navigation bar that connects you to information about these types of opportunities, but if you use the search function, you can actually turn up info on open positions and internship programs. I would have thought that this kind of information could have been connected to the education or outreach navigation tools, or have its own, but at least it turns up in the search function. The site needs some work, especially if it wants to expand its audience beyond middle and upper class females into a more expanded market–what one would hope that this museum is trying to do in order to promote understanding and knowledge about women’s role in the Art Historical narrative.
Sonya Baccus
