Museum of Fine Arts Houston

As you may remember, I posted on the Museum of Fine Arts Boston yesterday. Today's special is the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

The Museum of Fine Arts Houston has a digital library which focuses on the highlights from each of their collections. With only 8 to 24 images shown per collection, I was left wondering how many wonderful artworks they were hiding from me. Their site didn't seem to indicate that digitizing their entire collection was in the works, such as was the case with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

The audience for this digital library seemed to be "grazers". People who simply wanted a touch of information about what the museum held. I preferred MFA Boston's complete approach better. I'd rather see everything possible digitized (within copyright bounds, of course!) for the purposes of real information seekers, the enjoyment of the global community and researchers.

The digital assets at MFA Houston were presented by collection in groups of eight-to-a-page. Some collections had more than one page of highlights, others had just one. From the eight-to-a-page page, you could click on an image and the resulting web page would show an enlarged picture of the object, a detail of what collection it belonged to, as well as some information on who, what, when, where and how. The records did not give an ascension number like MFA Boston, nor did they give provenance of the artwork, so it seemed there could have been more information given.

The navigation between the enlarged images, the collection pages and overview pages was "clunky". There could have been more navigational features incorporated. Further, the search function was not intuitive. A search of "native american art" brought you to a listing similar to a Google search and you would have to "find" that there were links on this page that took you to the collections. I will say that while these pages that have been designed clearly by professionals look very nice, they are not the most user-friendly beasts.

Stay tuned! Tomorrow's field trip will be to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York.

--Jean