Textile Museum of Canada

The Textile Museum of Canada holds more than 12,000 pieces and represents over 200 countries and regions. It is one of only eight museums of it's kind in the world. The TMC Collection Online is a research tool of images and descriptions relating to thousands of works in the permanent collection. While the website states that it is ever expanding, I was unable to find a clear statement concerning the selection process of which items are to be digitized. On the left hand side of the search page they pull out "Popular Objects" but they do not indicate what "popular" references.



The TMC collection is searchable by keyword and also has an advanced search function that allows search by variety of categories including object, title, maker, local name, place made, materials, people, ID, etc. I typed in wedding and came across 56 items. You can view the retrieved items by list, list with thumbnails, or by a detailed catalog of each item.



I chose to view a wedding dress from the mid 20th century. The item view details what the object is, its local name, the place it was made, the date it was made, it's dimensions, the materials and techniques, as well as who the donor was and the objects unique ID number. Each object also has it's own narrative. The narrative of the above object (the wedding dress) is as follows: Most garments are made from cut-and-pieced fabric by shaping a two-dimensional plane of cloth onto a three-dimensional form – the human body. The shaping is to allow for ease of movement, but the number of triangular pieces or gores that fan out the lower part of this dress goes well beyond what is needed for comfort.

Both the front and the back of the dress can be enlarged to an impressive degree, allowing a lot of the embroidery and detailing to be visible. I think that other than not providing information about their selection process, that this site is a great tool for researchers and casual visitors who are interested in textiles. It is a better visual tool than it is a resource for people to learn in-depth information about each object, but that being said, the objects appear to have been digitized well, with regard for the physical object.