Website review: The Virtual Museum of New France

This website review is an assignment for our Public History class. Congratulations if you manage to get through it . . . you can check out the website at www.civilization.ca/vmnf.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is one of the most respected museums in the country. It is a pity that its website is not up to the standards we might expect of such an austere institution. For those looking for a comprehensive website or online educational resource about New France, the Virtual Museum of New France, a project of the Museum of Civilization, appears to be an ideal place to start. This website appears to be geared primarily towards school children and provides some basic information about the history of New France, important personalities of the period, daily life for the different kinds of people who lived there, a few educational /interactive activities, and links for those looking for more information for general research or genealogy purposes. Much of this information could be useful for an interested, although uninformed, member of the general public, a young student researching a project, or a teacher looking for additional resources. Unfortunately, the website is woefully out of date in a way that is difficult to ignore. The graphics and layout are distracting and it seems that the museum could be making far better use of their considerable resources to create an engaging and interactive website.

The Virtual Museum of New France was created as a joint project between a number of private and public collaborators, drawing on collections and resources from across North America and Europe. Information is organized into the following themes: Explorers, Great Names, First Nations, People (such as voyageurs, Filles du Roi, soldiers, etc.), and daily life. There is also a special feature on education in New France as well as several educational tools. There is a glossary and timeline for quick reference, as well as bibliographies included for most of the topics covered.

The outdated nature of the website poses a lot of problems. The site is a little difficult to navigate due to a lack of side bars or appropriate internal links. In the People section, none of the topics have been updated in at least eight years and not only are visually displeasing, but can be confusing as subheadings often have unclear titles like “A colourful expression”. One can only search the whole Museum of Civilization site and not the Virtual Museum itself, so it may take some time of futilely clicking on these links before finding the desired piece of information. Some of the topics in other categories were more recently created and are both more pleasing visually and easier to navigate, such as “Living in Canada at the Time of Champlain”. Nevertheless, it still remains impossible to search within these topics. The only place to search specific words is in the glossary. This remains problematic since the definitions are short and no links to the longer articles available on the website are available through the glossary. Furthermore, a few of the definitions are only available in French.

Through the ambiguously titled “Youth Adventures”, one is led to several educational resources including a bizarre cartographic puzzle, a lovely New France ABC and an activity for school children about a young boy immigrating to New France. The ABC uses images of artifacts from the museum, identifying the objects and their use as well as providing historical context. The school activity consists basically of reading a young boy’s diary and reacting to it. The graphics are awful and there is no level of interactivity, but the diary provides useful context about daily life in New France.

The Virtual Museum comes off as a bit of a hodge podge. It appears that the vision the creators had at the outset was not entirely realized. It provides a useful overview of many aspects of life in New France, but some key subjects are largely ignored. The section on First Nations people provides almost no information and certainly does not deal with Europeans’ interactions with the first people of Quebec. The site rarely makes use of its considerable resources to provide users with access to artifacts or documents from the museum’s collections. There are a few images interspersed with the text, but the New France ABC is the only concerted effort to actually use existing resources.

When this website was created, it may very well have been considered cutting edge. Unfortunately, it has not kept up with the times. It has not been updated for about six years, and many of the external links are no longer valid. This is a shame since some of the more recent exhibits are quite charming and there is certainly potential for an institution like the Museum of Civilization to make a formidable online resource.