Old museum offers new perspectives

Historical Web sites, when well done, give you the room and freedom to browse and wind your way across digital terrains, just as if you were strolling through a four-floor museum in some favorite destination city.

The nicely done Virtual Museum of Canada – http://virtualmuseum.ca – gives visitors plenty of ways to browse, whether it’s reading, listening or watching slideshows about our great northern neighbor.

VMC is an amalgam site, drawing together content from more than 2,000 Canadian museums, from large to small. The Manitoba-based GrainTransportmuseum.ca, for instance, is one of those subcollections. It showcases some interesting agricultural history, especially in western Canada’s dryland areas where early 20th-century grain farmers had to confront issues of transportation, storage and pricing much the way their counterparts in Washington, Montana and Idaho did.

Some of the VMC collections use audio and video effectively. Other sections rely on text and images.

With the Canadian loonie now about par with the U.S. dollar, we’re forced to turn to a digital visit from time to time to take the place of short trips to British Columbia.

Digital Photography Review

When you start looking at buying a digital camera as a gift, check out dpreview.com before whipping out the credit card.

Thousands of sites give all kinds of useful (or arcane and overly technical) information on digital photography. Digital Photography Review nicely steers a middle course, being neither too basic nor too complicated.

It’s elegantly organized as well. We recommend signing up for the free weekly newsletter to get an overview of new and popular features. We also suggest browsing the gallery of images. Though it’s eye candy and diverting, its primary purpose is to showcase the results of various digital cameras on the market.