The web site of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has more than 30,000 images searchable by who, what, where, and when.
posted by Trurl on Mar 8, 2012 - 11 comments

Eyes of a Generation is a "virtual museum of television cameras, and the broadcast history they captured," curated by actor and radio DJ Bobby F. Ellerbee. The site has hundreds of photos of cameras and of television sets backstage. It also includes vintage articles and a neat look at how the moon backdrop on the Conan set works. [more inside]
posted by zarq on May 10, 2011 - 5 comments

What Should Museums Throw Out? At a time when controversial moves by major art museums are making the public more aware than ever of how museums collect or discard objects, the University College of London's museum invites visitors to play curator in the exhibit Disposal, viewing some white-elephant objects and determining their fate. The museum also just wrapped up another innovative exhibit on objects and point of vew, Object Retrieval, in which one object was explored and responded to by a rolling team of contributors from varying displines, 24 hours a day, for one week.
posted by Miko on Oct 22, 2009 - 22 comments

This is James Savage's spare room, which contains one hundred Apple computers. He has more than 150 in his house and all of them are working perfectly, from an Apple II+ and a Lisa to the latest MacBook Pro. (One entrant among many in Gizmodo's Best Computer Rig contest.)
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Oct 4, 2007 - 53 comments

*Quite too Utterly Utter!* We all know about the Victoria & Albert Museum site, but did you know about the online V&A Access to Images? I didn't, and I've just spent a couple of happy hours poring over it. Type in any search term, and you are likely to get some interesting results. "Woodblock", for example, returns 16 pages, and "fairytale" nets you three pages of interesting 19th century marionettes. Here's somthing amusing to kick you off...
posted by taz on Sep 3, 2004 - 12 comments

The Smithsonian offers an online sampling of its Collection of Aeronautic Sheet Music. From the introduction: "...widespread fascination with flight has inspired an enormous output of historical drawings, paintings, advertisements and illustrations for publications. Some of the most colorful illustrations are those which adorn sheet music. In the Bella Landauer collection, you can find illustrations that range from the bizarre to the commonplace, from the humorous to the mundane. But most are colorful and interesting."
The collection is divided into categories such as "Ballooning", "Biplanes", and "Flying Machines". I love this one from 1914, called "A Hundred Years From Now".
posted by taz on Nov 12, 2002 - 9 comments