Pierpont Morgan was a legendary American banker who once bought out Andrew Carnegie to establish one of the world’s earliest mega-conglomerates in 1901. But that’s not what he is known for. He is more generally known for building a financial empire that included banks, railroads and the aforementioned conglomerates, and for wielding a lot of power as a result. His gene pool likely didn’t hurt his chances for success either: he is a descendant of one of the founders of Yale, and of Jonathan Edwards, one of “America’s greatest theologians” according to Wikipedia.
J.P. Morgan
Morgan left behind an impressive collection of rare books, manuscripts, drawings and ancient artifacts, which his son bestowed to the public trust a decade after the senior Morgan passed away. This became the Morgan Library & Museum, housed in a building next to the late Morgan’s former New York residence (“I want a gem,” he is reported to have said to the architect), now renovated with several extensions to the original building. The library is indeed a gem. Incidentally, in 1905 Morgan hired a 20-year old librarian from Princeton University, Bella da Costa Greene, who was instrumental in helping him build his extraordinary collection.
The Morgan’s website is a lesson in good design. Not only does the color scheme and general aesthetic of the website reflect the sensibility of the organization, which is what a website should do, but the site scores high on navigability. The pages are kept reasonably short, instead featuring hyperlinks that are used to direct visitors to more information on different pages. An excellent example of this is the History of the Morgan page. The menu and image frames remain stationary, while the content of the story progresses as the reader navigates between seven shorter pages, making for easier and less intimidating reading (ie. one is not scared away by long rows of text).
The Morgan’s blog is easily locatable from the home page of drop-down menus, under “About,” just after Social Media. I clicked on their YouTube link because something told me it was going to be good, and I was not disappointed. Their YouTube page is quite pleasing to look at (and you don’t expect YouTube to be pretty). The videos themselves are great. There are only 17 altogether, but there is an interesting range of videos: a conservation video about de-silking A Christmas Carol; a fast-forward time-lapse video of a renovation of the Library; a series of reflections on Jane Austen, including Cornel West on Austen. Considering that the Morgan Library & Museum houses a collection of ancient objects and rare books in a turn-of-the-century building, you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be the most media savvy of organizations. But you’d be wrong. Then again, I’m guessing the Morgan has a budget that could happily accommodate more than one public library, and they haven’t squandered their resources.
The Morgan Blog, in keeping with the general program, is excellent. The people running the Morgan definitely deserve credit for consistency. The blog is actually five sub-blogs: three related to previous exhibitions (Secrets from the Vault, The Diary Exhibition, and A Letter from Charles Dickens), one called New at the Morgan, and the last is simply Morgan Blog Home, which brings all the blogs together in one place. The blogs are easy to navigate between from a stationary menu of links to the right. Well-written and accessible entries highlight objects in the Morgan’s collection, and discuss interesting historical themes from different perspectives. The Morgan’s exhibition programme and blog are two sides of the same coin: both reflect the organization’s ability to present historical objects and topics in a way that is relevant to contemporary audiences. Guest writers also contribute to the mix, keeping the blog well varied. The entries are accompanied by nice colour images. I would definitely visit the Morgan’s website, blog, Twitter feed, YouTube, etc., on a regular basis, and am filing this whole enterprise under “media to steal ideas from”.
biblioposts 