During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.
A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.
July 1, 2006
Dioramas for New Generations
American Museum of Natural History
Stephen C. Quinn describing the
African Lion Diorama
Dioramas for New Generations
American Museum of Natural History
When he was five-years-old, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) encountered his first dinosaur at the American Museum of Natural History. There in 1946, as a Tyrannosaurus rex inspired him to become a paleontologist, Gould later recalled “I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck.”* When the child who was to become the famed scientist visited, there was much else to see at the great museum that very few children in Gould’s generation could hope to view except as a picture in a book. Unique and grand were the museum’s dioramas containing the finest work of taxidermists, modelers, and painters replicating animals, plants, and ecologies.
Now, through a collaboration of curators, traditional and digital artists, and Internet technology experts, the dioramas are open to the global online audience. Interestingly, because the exhibits are many decades old, parts of what is shown is nature which no longer exists. In a series of videos, free to play online, the project manager Stephen C. Quinn describes individual dioramas.
The network of free content that interconnects and extends from the diorama section opens a virtual excursion into natural history that includes links to many other sections of the museum’s online exhibits. In addition to serving the learning public, the dioramas exhibit brings value to the museum by attracting paid attendance and by providing advertising for the book about the dioramas written by Quinn and published by the museum.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould