Holocaust Exhibitions On-Line: An Exploration of the Use and Potential of Virtual Space in British and American Museum Websites

The history of the Holocaust presented within national museums, such as the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Exhibition and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is often uncritical and not focused upon the role of the country in which they are located. The Internet, as a flexible and more radical medium, has greater potential for the representation and teaching of the Holocaust as a complex history with a variety of chronologies and experiences. On-line display and interaction might be used to allow national museums to escape their conservative, apparently factual, narrative that serves to remove the history of Holocaust artificially from the geographic locale of a museum and from its visitors.