I have been following with great interest the current discussion on
web museums. I was particularly interested in the exchange between
Jim Angus and Mark Ast re the paucity of museum web sites with
substantial images of their collections.

Here at the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, we have been
quietly developing a web site which we hope will be of interest to
the general browsers and academic scholars alike.

The project is a collaborative venture between the Museum and the
Department of Computing Science. There has been no funding
allocation to this project whatsoever, just a lot of hard work and
goodwill on the part of all concerned.

What started out as an idea discussed over a beer (or two) between
myself and my colleague Chris Johnson from Computing Science, has
developed into what we consider to be a worthy framework from which
to expand into new areas of heritage presentation over the network.

The first phase involved a group of third year honours students
examining ways of solving navigation and design problems related to
the presentation of museum artefacts on the web. Stage two had one
of our IT Masters candidates looking at the problem of download time
for video over the web. Both these phases are now complete. The
students concerned all received high ratings for their reports.

Things have moved on at such a pace, and the project has attracted
such a high level of interest among the students and staff at the
University, that we are now poised to commence work on phase three
of the project which will involve high end research in map-based
navigation techniques, image compression, and domain expert use of
electronically stored museum collections.

You can view our efforts so far at:

http://www.gla.ac.uk/Museum

Your comments would be much appreciated.

Yours,


Jim Devine
Hunterian Museum
University of Glasgow
[log in to unmask]
http://www.gla.ac.uk/Museum/