People using Search the Collections… will find images of more than 100,000 objects… The online records vary from detailed studies written by curators to more basic inventory information which might include the maker, provenance, production technique and style… Users explore the site by clicking on images that scroll across the screen or by accessing the powerful search engine that identifies objects by type, maker, date, material or location in the V&A. Google maps show places of origin. Text mining technologies also allow searching of all the text associated with an object so for the first time researchers are able to move from one theme to another.

The example shown above is a board game from 1804 – “The New Game of Emulation Designed for The Amusement of Youth of both Sexes and calculated to inspire their Minds with an abhorrence of vice and a love of virtue.”  It was marketed as a morality game designed to lead children “to admire and adopt the virtues of Obedience, Truth, Honesty, Gentleness, Industry, Frugality, Forgiveness, Carefulness, Mercy, and Humility; and to view in their real colours the opposite vices of Obstinacy, Falsehood, Robbery, Passion, Sloth, Intemperance, Malice, Neglect, Cruelty and Pride.”  It is one of hundreds of games in the “games” category of the online collection.

Link, via.

A trip through the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago will make you glad you live in the modern world instead of the “good old days”! Wired has a gallery of exhibit photos ranging from a skull that belonged to a trepanation patient to early x-ray machines. Pictured is a vest used in 1899 to correct scoliosis. If this were posted as a “What Is It?” I would guess it to be an instrument of torture. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Last year, the Jiangsu Head Investment Group and the government of Nanjing, China held a competition for designing a museum for the automobile’s history and achievements.  Italian architect Francesco Gatti and his team won with this entry featuring an interactive element: you drive into the museum.

The architect describes the museum as a “movie sequence in which the principal actor is the car”, a building where two car-related panorama go hand in hand:   on the one hand the architect’s conscious attention to motorway aestheticism and urban scale – the structures and materials remind one of a viaduct – and on the other, his transportation into the museum of the ergonomics of the interior of a car.  The furbishing and details within the edifice are related to and on a scale with its specific functions and it is not difficult for the visitor to imagine that he is in a car on a highway, rather than in a museum.

Link (rendering courtesy of 3GATTI.)

To accommodate armchair tourists too timid to risk life and limbs, the Italian government funded the creation of The Virtual Museum of Iraq, showcasing pieces dating from the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian eras and more.

Check it out: Link – via Neal Ungerleider’s True/Slant blog

For the final time, people will gather here Saturday on two closed-off blocks of Main Street to celebrate National Mustard Day. There will be free hotdogs with mustard — there’s a $10 surcharge for those who dare to request ketchup — mustard painting and music by the Poupon U Accordion Band.

The Mustard Museum draws up to 30,000 visitors a year. Link to story. Link to Mustard Day website. -via J-Walk Blog

In a rare statement Banksy said: ‘The people in Bristol have always been very good to me – I decided the best way to show my appreciation was by putting a bunch of old toilets and some live chicken nuggets in their museum. [...]

He added: ‘This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my ictures up rather than scrape them off.’

The exhibition – called Banksy Versus Bristol Museum – consists of more than 100 items and will run for three weeks.

Link

Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf came from a long line of talented glassmakers. As a hobby, Leopold began making glass flowers from illustrations in natural history books. So beautiful, accurate and delicate were these models, a buzz began to generate in his hometown in Germany, and a local aristocrat commissioned 100 glass orchids. Leopold’s son, Rudolf joined him in the painstakingly intricate work. Thus began a prolific career in natural history glassmaking, ending in the largest commission of their lives; an order from Harvard college for over 3000 plant and flower models for their botany students. Leopold didn’t live to see the completion of the project, but Rudolf continued on without him, working alone from 1895 – 1936, three years before his own death.

Link to story. Link to more photographs at Flickr.

(image credit: Curious Expeditions)

Miniatur Wonderland in Hamburg, Germany is the largest model railway in the world. With 7 miles of tracks in an area of over 16,000 sq ft, 200,000 people, 4,000 cars, 800 buildings, it features 6 geographic regions including America. It’s a work in progress (!) with a goal of more than 13 miles of tracks. The builders have already clocked in more than 500,000 hours of work.

This video is a presentation of this amazing attraction; make sure you watch the ’small’ control room @ 3:35.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

Back in 2000 Stark convinced the Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, City Countil that they needed a tourist attraction and the toy museum would solve the problem. Five years later the museum opened its doors.

Inside is one of the largest action figure exhibits in the world, from a Star Wars display to a Batman shrine, the amount of figures the museum has on display outweighs its display space, meaning figures are on constant rotation so every character and creation gets it due.

Since opening in 2005 the museum has had visitors from every state in the U.S. and over thirty foreign countries, totaling over 40,000 visitors. Wired has gallery of pictures if you can’t go in person. Link

(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Every inch of Marvins Marvelous Mechanical Museum's 5500 square feet of floor space with 40 foot ceilings containing an array of buzzing and clattering new and vintage mechanical devices and oddities. Overhead dangle signs, animatronic dummies, over 50 airplane models gliding along a steel rail, vintage fans of all types, and classic sideshow posters. Marvin himself travels the world looking for odd coin operated devices, both new and old. Some of his machines are custom made just for him, and can not be seen in operation anywhere else. Marvin's is also listed in the World Almanac's 100 most unusual museums in the U.S.

Link

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Luci.