Didn’t feel like putting on pants and going to the museum today? That’s fine. The Museum of Boulder has officially made it possible to explore its collections — and a whole lot of Boulder history — from your phone, laptop, or couch. Wearing bottoms, in this case, is optional.
This month, the museum launched two new digital platforms that expand public access to its collections and exhibits, both inside the building and far beyond it. Together, they allow visitors to explore Boulder’s history on site, from home, or from anywhere with a decent Wi-Fi signal, including thousands of objects that rarely, if ever, make it out of storage.
One of those platforms is PastPerfect Online, a searchable public database that opens up the museum’s permanent collection. The other is Bloomberg Connects, a free multimedia museum guide app that offers audio, video, photographs and translations designed to deepen the visitor experience.
For Emily Zinn, the Museum of Boulder’s director of education, the motivation behind the launch was straightforward.
“Access is a huge part of it, and accessibility specifically,” Zinn said. “The digital platforms allow you to experience the collections and content of the museum both on site, in a unique way, and remotely from home or wherever you are.”
Language access was a major factor. Bloomberg Connects, an app that features guides to more than 1250 arts hubs, offers translations in 52 languages, addressing gaps that persist even in bilingual exhibits.
“There’s still a huge gap when it comes to language accessibility,” Zinn said. “This gives that additional ease of access in your own language. It will automatically come up in the language your phone is set to, or you can choose within the interface.”
The two platforms serve different audiences and purposes. PastPerfect Online functions as a comprehensive database, designed for researchers, educators, students and anyone curious enough to dig into primary sources on their own.
“We hold the material heritage of the City of Boulder,” Zinn said. “Before, it took a certain baseline level of knowledge to reach out and ask what we had. Now people can look remotely, run their own searches, and see what types of things we collect.”
The online collection includes a 1940s wheelchair from the Boulder Sanitarium, where patients once followed holistic health principles like strict vegetarian diets, consumed cereal-based meals produced in an on-site factory and were prescribed hydrotherapy, fresh air, and long hikes up Mount Sanitas by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who, in addition to co-founding the sanitarium, also gave the world cornflakes.
There’s also a pair of 1926 wedding shoes belonging to Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones, the first Black woman to graduate from the University of Colorado Boulder, who was handed her diploma in private, but barred from walking at commencement. Her achievement went unrecognized for nearly a century, and her shoes, saved among the few keepsakes from her long life, now sit in the museum’s collection. They’re visible on PastPerfect Online, along with her biography and a summary of her legacy.
Bloomberg Connects, by contrast, is designed as a curated experience. It layers storytelling directly onto exhibits through audio and video, including first-person accounts that visitors cannot access otherwise.
Through the app, visitors can hear Boulder-based Olympic gold medalist Connie Carpenter-Phinney describe her winning bicycle race while standing in front of the bike itself at the Museum of Boulder. Other sections expand on Indigenous histories through interviews not available in the museum galleries, including footage with descendants of treaty-granted tribes connected to the Boulder Valley.
“This access allows for expanding narratives and giving more personal perspectives,” Zinn said.
Zinn said the shift to digital access reflects a broader change in museums nationwide — namely, the realization that most of what’s preserved never makes it onto the gallery floor.
“At any given time, there are a few hundred objects on view at most,” Zinn said. “We have about 45,000 objects in storage. This gives the public access to those materials without causing harm or reducing their longevity.”
Both platforms are free to users and available now. Zinn says that the museum’s goal is to make sure the stories preserved inside its walls feel like they belong to everyone.
“Trying to expand access is something I care a lot about,” she said. “Museums should feel like spaces for everyone.”
Whether that happens on Broadway Street or from a living room couch, the Museum of Boulder is now making room for both.
