Museums and Exhibits

Many of the world's finest museums now provide electronic exhibits that allow you and your students to browse the best of art, history, science and other subjects with a click of the mouse.

Art | Science and Technology | History and Archaeology

Art

The Louvre Web site includes samples of art works from the museum’s extensive selection with information about each piece. The site also features a QuickTime movie virtual visit to the Louvre.

The World Digital Library hosts digital versions of maps, photographs, prints, rare books and other cultural treasures from around the world. Users can browse for items using a map or timeline, or search in any of seven languages on this site that is provided by the Library of Congress with UNESCO and partners from around the world.

WebMuseum is an online gallery of famous paintings from museums all over the world. The images may be searched by artist or by theme, and a glossary of themes is provided.

The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco features an "Imagebase" of over 65,000 digitized images from the museum's collection. The imagebase is searchable by artist, country, period or even the subject represented in the work of art. The site also include virtual galleries for several exhibits.

MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) provides several interactive exhibits including the Art Safari which guides children to write about what they see in art. Samples of art annotated by the curator from the museum’s collection are also available.

The J. Paul Getty Museum of Art site displays a well organized sample of artworks from various collections (antiquities, decorative arts, drawings, manuscripts, etc.). Images of the artwork as well as historical information and biographies of the artists are provided in the collections overview.

The Performing Arts Encyclopedia is a guide to exhibits about music, theater, and dance at the Library of Congress.

Science and Technology

The Exploratorium features great interactive science exhibits such as Frogs! and The Science of Chocolate. Other features include many online visual puzzles and a library of instructions for creating easy science exhibits and experiments.

The National Air and Space Museum provides historic and scientific information about air and space with online exhibits such as How Things Fly, Space Race and GPS: A New Constellation.

The National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, Italy contains an excellent exhibit on Leonardo DaVinci.

At Questacon, Australia's National Science and Technology Centre students can take a virtual tour, solve puzzles, or do hands-on science activities on such topics as buoyancy, patterns, meteors and more.

The Franklin Institute Science Museum provides online exhibits designed for students.

The Computer Museum features interactive activities on robots and networks, and downloadable teacher materials on the history and uses of computers.

History and Archaeology

Paleontology without Walls is an extensive collection of online exhibits about plants, animals and the natural world from the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

The Field Museum of Natural History provides electronic versions of some of its exhibits, including Javanese masks, dinosaurs, lions and the anthropology collection.

The London Natural History Museum features a number of interactive exhibits, including the Dino Directory and Nature Online .

The National Museum of American History provides features online exhibits on topics from quilts to sweatshops to the sixties. It also features a visual timeline of American history.

The Royal Ontario Museum features online activities for students, such as an interactive archaeological dig and exploration of an Iriquoian longhouse.

The National Zoo site allows students virtually visit the animals via live WebCams and an extensive photo library with scientific information on each animal.

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology presents the work of underwater archaeologists and maritime historians present to the public via the Internet. The site includes a children's introduction to underwater archaeology and an online gallery about the Confederate raider CSS Alabama.

Odyssey Online is designed to support the use of museum objects in your classroom. It was developed by the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University, the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, and the Dallas Museum of Art and features objects from their collections. The site includes a Teachers' section with interactive tutorials, and an elementary and middle school section that takes students on a journey to explore the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and 19th - 20th century sub-Saharan Africa using maps and museum artifacts.

The Text-only menu provides accessible and printer-friendly access to the Surf Report Archives.

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