| rev:text
| - I'm a big fan of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and always have been; I remember being a kid and walking through the old white dinosaur hall before their current mural-walled set-up came into existence. So yes, this museum and I go way back.
The pros: it's just a great museum! You've got the Dinosaurs In Their Time exhibit that shows off a small fraction of the museum's massive collection, the halls of animals from different parts of the country, the gemstone gallery, lots of hands-on areas for kids and kids at heart (i.e. digging for bones, hands-on animal galleries, etc.), a section of the museum dedicated to local floral life, the Egyptian, Arctic and Native American wings, and finally the temporary/traveling exhibit section. And that still doesn't cover everything here. This is a really, really fun, informative and diverse museum. BUT, despite having a massive range of interesting topics and galleries to explore (not even including the art wings of its neighborliness museum), it's not too big, either, and this is important: there are some museums where I can only get through about half of the exhibits before I'm "museumed out" from information overload. This is not one of those places - always a plus!
The cons: aside from their traveling/temporary exhibit hall specifically, things really don't change around here. A lot of the photo galleries have been in place as far back as I can remember, some of the videos are almost 10 years old if not older, and some galleries have just never, ever changed since I was a little kid - in fact the Egyptian exhibit is exactly the same now as it was when I was about five years old, except that an old tomb you had to duck down and crawl into is covered up and gone. Such a disappointment! And the age shows, because a lot of the interactive/narrative screens and such in these parts of the museum break down constantly - or there's no interactive screens at all, and you have to read textbook amounts of text in tiny fonts on dimly lit walls. I can do it, don't get me wrong, but compared to the bright and interesting Dinosaur Hall, it's almost like you're stepping into an entirely different museum the further away you get from its hallmark exhibit. It would just be really nice if the entire museum - not just the dinosaur hall - got a makeover at some point.
Oh, and their cafe is not that good. It's better than it used to be, but seriously, if you're going to be in Oakland anyway, just walk across the street and eat something there after your visit.
Still, even the "worst" parts of the museum are pretty darn cool - I've been on a number of really fun dates here and have a membership to make sure I can enjoy it whenever I want. I'll be back soon!
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)