While I agree with previous commentators that "visiting" a museum on the Web is
hardly a substitute for visiting a real museum, I do not think museum Web sites
are necessarily limited to being the electronic equivalent of pamphlets about
the museum. Consider two situations:

First, a museum with a very limited collection, such as the new Museum of
Sydney in NSW, Australia. That museum is highly dependent upon the use of
images, with accompanying text, to tell its story. This can be done quite
adequately on the Web, especially for any special exhibitions or small programs
which a museum with a very limited collection might wish to mount.

Second, two museums which might want to collaborate on an exhibition but which,
for any number of reasons, cannot afford to do it via a physical exhibition.
For example, I personally am interested in exploring the possibilities of
participating in a joint "virtual" exhibition comparing aspects of West Coast
Native cultures with Maori culture, where the assets of both our museum and a
major New Zealand museum (or museums!) might be combined through the use of
images, hypertext, etc., in one relatively "seamless" electronic whole. Yes, it
would be nice to do a large physical exhibition, but it is pretty hard to move
Maori meeting houses and totem poles around! Also, this way, we can bring
something of the cultures to a much wider group of potential "visitors" across
the world, who do not have the wherewithal to make physical visits.

The same idea can be taken to a higher plane. We have always had legislative
authority to create a Museum of New France, but we have realized for some time
that we will never have the money to create a "bricks and mortar" museum. There
are, however, large amounts of visual and textual information in, inter alia,
Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Prince
Edward Island, France, and Lousiana which could be selected, organized and
linked into one large "virtual" museum - a museum which could never have been
created any other way.

I have looked at a wide variety of museum Web sites over the past several
months - museums which I know I will never be able to visit. Yes, my visits are
undoubtedly pale facsimiles of "real" visits, but are they not better than no
visits at all? How many other people out there - in the general public - are in
the same boat?

To think that museum Web sites exist only to help people select sites for
cultural tourism is, in my opinion, short-sighted, in this age of information
and the "global village".


Harry Needham
Canadian Museum of Civilization