Digital reviews | London Museum, the Miners’ Strike and American Jewish heritage

Website | London Museum

I liked the London Museum’s website as soon as I clicked on it. Its design feels clean, functional and uncomplicated, while its images and headlines made me want to click some more – which, I think, is all we really want from an online museum experience.

The site is image heavy (lovely) and the navigation is clear (perfect), but what I loved most about it was that it felt like the museum, rather than just the museum website, and that’s really exciting to me.

When museums close for refurbishments – or, in the case of London Museum, an enormous relocation project – websites can often talk a lot about what is coming down the line. But this new site feels rooted in the present.

The museum lives and breathes in the shape of its still-open London Museum Docklands and its busy programme of London-wide events, but it also lives and breathes here, online, with its focus on stories. The new buildings are exciting, of course, but they are not the main story here.

Using editorial content is front and centre of London Museum’s digital strategy. The creators acknowledge the issue of how we often don’t have a clue what to search for when we arrive at a museum website – overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of stuff.

They head this off by offering a suggestion of starting your journey by picking a London borough and seeing where that online adventure takes you. If that doesn’t float your search boat, you can filter by topic, which are brilliantly and invitingly titled.

With so much content, the team is using AI to help find relationships between stories and objects, which feels like a positive use of the machine mind. The digital team talks about creating lateral, rather than literal, connections between objects – so, for example, if you were looking at a coin, you might, with a literal connection, get shown a load of other coins, whereas with a lateral connection you might get shown things from the collection relating more broadly to the coin, like the place or time the coin was in use. It works beautifully, and I’m excited to see more.

3D tour | 84/85: The Longest Year, National Coal Mining Museum

I was eight when the miners’ strike began – brought up in the shadow of the north-east pits but too young to understand how the strike affected people around me. The town of my youth still has a strong identity with the pits, which soaks into your bones and makes you always interested in the history of coal mining and its legacy.

So I wanted to try an online version of the National Coal Mining Museum’s 84/85 – The Longest Year exhibition. But it isn’t an online exhibition per se, rather a 3D tour of the exhibition space. I get lost in online 3D spaces, however, finding them clumsy to operate and missing the flow of the exhibition. Surely web content is meant to be easier than this?

This Matterport rendition of the exhibition is beautiful to look at, and it’s nice to float around the gallery, getting a sense of how it looks in real life. But you don’t come away with a sense of the exhibition’s overall narrative.

I clicked on a few objects in their cases and read the text that popped up, and tried to position myself in front of text panels. But it felt like neither a real person’s view nor a particularly great online experience, so I pottered off and wondered about a trip in person some time instead.

Website and app Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York

It was a joy to discover the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s website. There is no need for a transatlantic air fare to experience what this place is all about.

Do have a look, as it’s a good example of a museum thinking about its visitors from both near and far. Recently, to add to its excellent digital portfolio, the museum has partnered with Bloomberg Connects, which offers audio tours and behind-the-scenes videos, as well as digital materials and resources.

These resources work and stand alone for virtual visitors, as well as those lucky enough to get to this museum in real life. I’m slowly working my way through the content available on the app and recommending it to friends and colleagues as I go.