Museums conduct activity both in the physical and digital realms. Even if the majority of museums, seen in a global perspective, have yet to establish a presence on the Internet, such things as museum websites are a well-established facet of museum activity. In the museum profession's conventional frame of reference, this projection of museum activity into the digital environment is subservient to the real museum work conducted at real museums with real objects. The various documents, images, sound recordings, and other multimedia material that we contribute to the vast repository of information that is the Internet, are useful surrogates for objects but are not objects, themselves. From the perspective of professions that are immediately anchored in the networking environment, a digital document is very much an object -- a "binary object" as opposed to a "physical object" -- but an object nonetheless. (This distinction can also be made using the terms "digital" and "tangible", but their etymologies are not entirely separate.) If museums are to harness the full potential afforded by the Internet, we need to accommodate the notion of curatorial responsibility for binary objects. This is not a simple matter of making physical surrogates for works that were originally created digitally and then treating the bearers of those recordings as physical objects in a traditional manner. The Internet provides a platform for creative cultural action that not just can, but must, be regarded as intangible cultural property every bit as clearly as, say, a live musical performance. There are circumstances that can render both non-amenable to physical encapsulation. Exemplifying with performance originating in the physical realm, this would include situations where tradition and/or law forbids any form of recording. What remains is the eyewitness chronicle of such an event and, in this day and age, the medium by which such a thing is disseminated is as likely to be digital as it is to be physical. (If anything, electronic publication may be the more common of the two modes.) In many such situations an object only becomes meaningful when taken together with contextual information borne by other media. It may also be that the secondary material is all that exists. The object presented to the public thus becomes the sum of itself and the external descriptive material. This is an obvious restatement of a principle that has long be at the heart of museum activity, but it also gives rise to another spectrum alongside the one mentioned at the outset of this message. An object will reside on a continuum spanning from the physical realm into the digital, and a given object may be located at any point on this spectrum. All are certainly the concern of museums. And -- heresy of heresies -- there is no intrinsic reason why an organization requires a physical nexus to be able apply sound museological principles to increasing the public understanding of museum objects, and to enhancing their enjoyment of that experience. /Cary - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Change ICOM-L subscription options, unsubscribe, and search the archives at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/icom-l.html