The following are examples of major national and regional museums with interactive online educational resources. Some particular personal favorites are also included. To search for other museums, MuseumNetwork.com, is a useful guide to 33,000 museums worldwide.

This site offers multimedia virtual tours with videos and 3-D images for exhibits on changing topics such as "Fighting Dinosaurs", "Tropical Butterflies" and "The Vikings". It also links to the Rose Center for Earth and Space, featuring the renovated Hayden Planetarium.

The San Francisco-based Exploratorium offers more than 650 exhibits in science, art and human perception and is a leader in promoting museums as educational centers. This comprehensive, interactive multimedia site includes more than 10,000 Web pages with sound and video files, activities for exploring such topics as the "Bubble Bomb", and a digital library of past exhibits.

The Field Museum offers a collection of online educational exhibits on topics that include "Sue on the Web", about the largest, most complete, and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton; "Sounds from the Vaults" on music through digital technology; and "Javanese Masks". The site also offers a variety of related educational resources, with information on visiting museums and ideas for long-term projects.

The Henry Ford Museum is dedicated to innovation in America, and Greenfield Village offers historic grounds and buildings staffed by costumed presenters, and the collections of both can be toured online. The site also offers resources for teachers and students, and online exhibits that include "Stories of Inventors", "The Showroom of Automotive History" and "Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House".

The museum’s collection now includes more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and design objects, and offers online examples. This museum also offers a great variety of interactive multimedia projects such as "Conversations with Contemporary Artists" and "Technology in the ‘90s".

Based at the University of California at Berkeley, this museum offers a variety of online exhibits on geologic time, the patterns and diversity of life, and evolutionary theory. It also includes K-12 resources with classroom activities, lessons, and information tours such as "Getting into the Fossil Record".

This museum offers a variety of permanent and temporary online exhibits on topics such as "The Farm", "The Coalmine" and the "International Space Station". It also includes resources that support museum exhibits such as photographs and film clips of hatching chicks, and an online book on the space project Mercury.

The aquarium provides extensive information on marine animals, their habitats, rescue and rehabilitation, and a live online camera to view dolphins. The site also links to the Institute for Exploration founded by Dr. Robert A. Ballard, who discovered the Titanic, and to related ocean education projects hosted by the National Geographic Society and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Mystic Seaport holds more than two million items that document the American maritime experience, including vessels, photographs, film and video footage, manuscripts, imprints, art, tools and artifacts from the 18^th century to the present. The extensive online multimedia resources include a movable Web camera, and links to related sites including information on the Amistad slave trade shipboard revolt of 1839.

National Air and Space Museum

This museum maintains the largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft in the world, and is a center for research into the history, science and technology of aviation and space flight. Here you will find outstanding educational resources and interactive exhibits with photos, documents, video and audio on major events such as the Apollo missions to the moon.

The gallery offers a great variety of online virtual tours on present and past exhibits, as well as collection tours such as the one on Venetian painting in the 16^th century, and in-depth study tours on individual artists. It also includes a special "NGA Kids" section with multimedia art activities and projects, such as an animated musical visit to the museum’s sculpture garden.

This site offers an extensive selection of virtual exhibits on topics such as "The Star-Spangled Banner", and "The American Presidency", a hands-on history room and science center, a clickable timeline with period artifacts, and a "What Is It?" feature for a sample object in the collections. It also offers museum resources for educators, and a searchable guide to site contents.

Explore the sights and sounds of an 1830s Massachusetts village and the lives of early New Englanders with an online tour, interactive map and 360-degree panoramic views. The museum has nearly 40 restored buildings, including mills, shops, homes, a working farm and meeting houses, and it offers a variety of educational programs and activities for students and teachers.

This site presents extensive content on the Pilgrims, voyages to the new world on ships including the Mayflower, the recreation of the 1627 Pilgrim village, life in the Plymouth colony 1620-1692, Wampanoag Native Americans, and the first Thanksgiving. The site includes a comprehensive library and bibliography on colonial history and information on Pilgrim genealogy.

This largest museum complex in the world offers searchable online collections from its 16 museums and galleries, with artifacts that can be zoomed and rotated, and virtual multimedia tours on topics such as "On Time" that explores the changing ways Americans have measured and thought about time through the past 300 years. The site offers extensive education resources, and is available in low-bandwidth and high-bandwidth versions.

The museum produces and collects video and audio taped testimonies of Holocaust survivors, resistance fighters, rescuers, witnesses, bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, liberators and postwar prosecutors, including interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish survivors. The site offers online multimedia exhibitions, a searchable database of photographs and resources for students and educators.