I am confused, are we looking at the same page? This seems like a perfectly ordinary web page when I view it. There is a photo gallery in the middle that is probably JavaScript-based, but that's working fine for me too. I clicked the zoom button and used the right and left arrows to browse through it (or swiped on my phone). I viewed it both on my phone and on my portrait mode 4K monitor, looks great on both.

I'm not disputing what you saw, just puzzled that we seem to be seeing two different things.

I wonder if the URL was changed or something? This is the one I'm looking at:

http://sites.utexas.edu/ransomcentermagazine/2018/01/18/deca...

The interface is a desaster.

I was pretty excited to browse the collection. But after 5 minutes I gave up. It's too frustrating.

The giant fixed header is a pain. And you cannot open the images in a new tab because they do not use normal links.

All museums do this; it's an understandable inability to relinquish control. If they actually just wanted people to have access to the images, they could just make a torrent. They would spring up on 100 different sites in at least 4 different ways (modern internet, you know), and people with a deeper interest could download the lot and examine them in their viewers of choice at their leisure.

People would also completely forget the source, and the museum would get very little credit for the effort put into digitizing them. Sharing this data is not naturally profitable and can't be made profitable without some form of DRM, and a terrible interface is de facto DRM. This is a typical place where the state should intervene, where huge value for the many (the sum of small value for hundreds of millions of people) is sadly outweighed by infinitesimal costs to a few (the sum of the massive labor of half a dozen people.)