Seattle Center’s Museum of Popular Culture’s (MoPOP) curatorial director Jacob McMurray is spearheading a project to move the beloved museum’s contents into an accessible online format.
Seattle Center’s Museum of Popular Culture’s curatorial director Jacob McMurray is spearheading a project to move the beloved museum’s contents intoMcMurray began working at what would eventually become the Museum of Popular Culture in 1994. At the time, the museum’s founder, the late Paul Allen, envisioned building the world’s largest collection of Jimi Hendrix artifacts and relics.
Today, the museum boasts 80,000 individual pieces of history— spanning everything from original Beatles setlists bearing scribbled notes of last-minute song selections to glow sticks and memorabilia taken from Korean Pop concerts. That goal is helped with the online portal, easing access and contextual understanding. Many of the items on digital display are captioned with at least two to three paragraphs of context and information about the piece in question, information that can assist universities when the museum is tapped by researchers, for example.