The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum serves as the country’s official remembrance of the millions who perished during the Holocaust in Europe. Chartered by an Act of Congress in 1980, the primary mission of the museum is to advance and disseminate information about this unprecedented tragedy. To that end, the subdued graphic design of the museum’s Web site is very appropriate to its somber subject‐matter.
The layouts of the various pages are consistent and complementary. This well‐documented site provides access to unique sources of primary and secondary information about the Holocaust. The Web site does, however, have areas which need improvement. On the top level page, there is no text to indicate the purpose of the Web site. Such text is not only fundamental for comfortable navigation but also a basic search engine enhancement. This essential information is buried on a third level page. Additional pages, such as “About the Holocaust” and “About the museum”, also have no text, only navigation, while the titles of these subpages suggest explanatory text. On the other hand, some sublevel pages contain good text, but no navigation. There is also no indication of when the site was created or last updated.
There are several navigation bars on the top level page: “Features,” “Contents,” and “Fast Finder”. The “Features” bar is to the left of the page and highlights special pages of the Web site. The javascript button enhancements on this bar link to a slide show containing text and images, although the user must interact with the page to activate the slide show. The result is interesting, as well as attractive; but too much text in the form of images reduces non‐image loading functionality as well as search engine functionality. While the red color of the type is graphically striking next to the somber background, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the color blind or visually impaired to read.
The “Contents” bar, which appears in blue type, is centered on the page beneath the slide show and leads to the hierarchical subpages of the site. Both the “Features” bar and the “Contents” bar are repeated at the bottom of the page in small, red, sans serif type, severely limiting their use by the visually impaired. The third navigation is a pop‐up bar, “Fast Finder,” which appears to be a kind of site map. However, it lists 26 links which include some, but not all, of the “Contents” headings, plus some, but not all, of the subpages under those content headings. This causes confusion.
Another design flaw which affects search engine functionality is the limited number of metatags (there are only six: holocaust, shoah, jews, survivors, holocaust museum), making it difficult to find the site through search engines. More metatags are needed, such as United States, memorial, museum. In addition, the overall design of the top level page would be enhanced by having the“Policy on privacy” statement as a hyperlink to a subpage rather than on the top level page in tiny unreadable print.
One of the most valuable parts of the Web site is the “Collections & archives” section which includes catalogs of the museum’s manuscript, oral history, film, music, and artform formats. It is searchable by keywords,surnames, Library of Congress subject headings, and geographical place names. Both simple and advanced (key words in text, subject, author, place, person as subject) search options are offered and are easy to use. A help link is provided for constructing search strategies. A simple search for Schindler in the photo archive brought up five records hyperlinked to the images. A simple search for Schindler in the document archive yielded ten catalog entries, each containing a list of hyperlinked subject headings, plus hyperlinked geographic names when appropriate. This Web site provides valuable and well‐documented resources related to the Holocaust.
