Overview
The Mattatuck Museum, located on the Waterbury Green in central Connecticut, has a vast collection of documents, photographs and personal stories covering more than three centuries of the history of the greater Waterbury and Naugatuck Valley region. Through its extensive assets, the museum brings the city of Waterbury’s history to life, showcasing a city of distinct neighborhoods. The community has been shaped by its geography, its history and its tight ethnic communities of people drawn first to its agricultural center and later to work in the brass mills and other industries.

The Challenge
Like most museums today, the Mattatuck team wanted to use the internet to reach beyond the physical museum and to encourage virtual visitors to explore the richness of the area’s heritage within an exploratory, yet directed online experience. As a small museum, the Mattatuck wanted to provide a compelling experience comparable to other museums on the web, but with a much smaller budget.

In addition, the Mattatuck recognized the importance of keeping the web site current, as new assets became available and new needs to be added to the site. The challenge would be to create a sophisticated design that captured the experience they wanted, yet allowed the museum staff to continue adding to the online exhibits without the need for specialized technical skills

• Brass City Life: Waterbury Neighborhoods
  This online exhibit is an extension of the Mattatuck Museum experience - presenting information on the distinctive neighborhoods in the city of Waterbury. The site was architected to encourage visitors to freely explore the museum’s collection of photographs, documents and written testimonials.
  
  To provide a rich and compelling experience, the New Tilt team designed the site to enable online visitors to create their own exploration path by either utilizing the dropdown list of neighborhoods or by using a map that displayed the neighborhoods within the city of Waterbury. Building a navigation method based on a map required the use of Flash technology, a skill set that did not exist among the museum staff.
  
  To support the self-support goal of the exhibit, the New Tilt team designed the site structure and the Flash animation from the beginning to support all the possible neighborhoods even though content was still being prepared after the initial launch. Parameters were set within the HTML code that are used by Flash to define which neighborhoods should be hidden or made visible. The museum staff, which has skills in HTML, can easily modify these variables. This approach allows the staff to add new neighborhoods to the site as content becomes available, without disturbing the carefully designed visual appeal of the site.
  
  
• Fortune's Story
  One of the powers of the web is the ability to create additional experiences based on museum assets through storytelling. The Mattatuck staff wanted to tell the story of slavery in New England. They approached their goal by utilizing primary sources and information to chronicle the life of a slave named Fortune and, by extension, following the story of slavery in Waterbury.
  
  The Fortune’s Story site is a pure HTML site with a content architecture that expands the experience of the museum assets. Additionally, curriculum materials are available for incorporating the museum experience into lesson plans.

The Result
The Mattatuck has expanded access to their deep collection of materials from greater Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley region to visitors across the world. The online experiences have provided much greater exposure for the museum and its goals. The online materials and tools have created a much greater partnership with educators in the region.