Lincoln In Our Time: Online Museum Exhibition Website

Abstract

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies presented a series of programs, including a 2-day symposium of internationally-renowned scholars and a six-week-long exhibition of Lincoln-related artifacts in Newman Library. The exhibition included both objects and video presentations by students in Hist 2984, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, the Myth, the Legend. Our client, Kim Kutz, wanted a website to accommodate the exhibit. It would be a WordPress site that exists within the current Virginia Tech Lincoln WordPress site. Our original plan was to include a 3D virtual tour of the Lincoln exhibit in the Newman Library. However, once the exhibit was set up and we visited it, we decided it was too small to be suitable for a virtual tour. So instead, we took pictures of it from various angles to include in an image slider on the homepage of our website. We decided our website would contain two pages, since it was just an addition to the already existing Virginia Tech Lincoln website. These two pages would be a homepage and an artifacts page documenting all the artifacts relating to Lincoln that the Newman Library owns. The homepage included the image slider with the various pictures we took of the exhibit as well as a short description of the purpose of the exhibit and what it contained. In this description, we included a link to the artifacts page. The website has two tabs, one for each page, as well as a search bar so a user can search within the site. The artifacts page contains a photo grid that uses the Mural Theme currently available as one of the themes Wordpress provides. With the Mural Theme, each square photo when hovered over displays text that describes the title of the photo. Additional text can be added to describe the photo. We just included the title of each photo and our client can add text as she wishes in the future. Each of the photos in our photo grid is of one of the Lincoln artifacts that was displayed in the Lincoln exhibit. Therefore, the titles were the names of these artifacts. When one of these photos is clicked, the user is transported to a separate page where he or she can view the student presentations explaining these artifacts. The presentations were done by students in Dr. Kim Kutz’s history class. She provided us with these presentations and specifically requested that they be included in our site. The presentations consisted of YouTube videos and Prezi presentations. We allowed both the YouTube and the Prezi presentations to be shown in WordPress’s lightbox feature. In addition, clicking the title of each video takes the user to the YouTube page where the video exists. This submission contains a zip file of the website files, Word and PDF versions of the final report, and PowerPoint and PDF versions of the final presentation.