web resources

The New Media department of the Science Museum started a blog called “Science Museum Dev” (short for development, I guess) last July to spread news “about some of the work we do, developing websites and interactive exhibits for one of the most famous museums in the world”. Unfortunately they haven’t updated it since November — please […]

Jim Spadaccini, director of Ideum, has created a special search engine (a Google Co-op) for museum blogs. Try it here.   

Another highly influential buzz-phrase in contemporary medical discourse is ‘evidence based medicine’ (EBM). Many medical people believe this is a fairly recent step in the history of medical progress; historians on the other hand have questioned the novelty of the phenomenon and pointed to its long durée and that evidence based (i.e., empirical) medical practice is in principle going back all the way to […]

MuseumBlogs.org is a directory of (at present 98) museum and museum-related blogs. The majority of the posts are from the RSS feeds of the blogs listed in the directory (we don’t yet, but Benny will soon help us install the function). The site was developed by Ideum, a small design company that develops interactive exhibits and websites for […]

Google (who else?) have just launched the beta version of Patent Search. The database currently contains all approx. 7 million US patents from 1790s to mid-2006 — and will be continuously updated and expanded to cover a number of non-US patent offices as well. Read more about it here. Needless to say this is a potentially […]

Every historian’s/curator’s wet dream is to find the door to a forgotten attic with all sorts of so far unseen historical documents and artefacts. This is what two former staff members at the Willard Psychiatric Center in New York State and a New York State Museum curator did in 1995 when they opened a hidden door to an […]

Take a look at the brand new Journal of Visualized Experiments which wants to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. The “YouTube for test tubes”, as news (at) nature writes. The editors’ explicit aim is to help researchers reproduce biomedical experimental procedures, but it certainly has museological applications as well. These videos is a reminder […]

Apropos the recent debate about the reliability of Wikipedia — take a look at the Uncyclopedia which already has about 175 articles on science (including a very instructive one on “intelligent rotation”). The Uncyclopedia is perhaps not as subtle as The Onion, but with a little help from its friends it could be turned into […]

I cannot really explain why I’m so fascinated with this eight-minute animation of molecular mechanisms within the cell? “The Inner Life of a Cell” was created for Harvard University biology students by XVIVO, a scientific animation company. Turn off the accompanying music-hall piano sound and enjoy the “slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space”. There […]

Intute, the internet service for education and research created by a consortium of UK universities, has just launched a very useful tutorial for historians to the internet. It is primarily written for general historians in the UK, but the general advices and the topics chosen can easily be transferred to other national contexts and to, […]