Northern Museums

For this assignment, I chose the Arctic University Museum of Norway and the Alaska Aviation Museum in Anchorage. I wanted to compare the About pages to start. The Arctic University Museum says the exhibits provide comprehensive information about the history of our planet Earth as well as the evolution and adaptations of birds and animals in the Northern regions. They have information on Northern Lights Displays, the Sami people, Viking burials, medieval artifacts, and even sand boxes where you can dig for your own fossils! It is also a fully accessible museum to wheelchair users and people with disabilities. I could not find a mission statement for the museum itself. The Alaska Aviation Museum houses interactive displays, memorabilia, photographs, films, and artifacts from personal collections of Alaska’s pioneer aviators. Their site also talks about their board of directors, staff, trustees board, environment board, the history of the museum, and the mission statement.

While scrolling through the different exhibits, the Arctic University Museum of Norway seems to focus mainly on pictures and informational paragraphs. They have 5 permanent exhibits you can access online which have 1 to 4 photos of pieces in the exhibit and information that makes you want to visit to learn more about each piece. The Alaska Aviation Museum’s exhibits page on the other hand has a short video where you can see what the inside of the museum looks like as if you were walking through it. Then you can see pictures of 29 different displays inside the museum as well as informational blurb about each one. Their site also has a visitor map of the different exhibits. I thought that the differences between the two sites were pretty surprising, but I enjoyed both very much!

My Question to you is when looking at different “Northern” Museums, did you struggle finding websites that were also accessible in English?