This conversation re-emerges every six months or so: the relationship
   of WWW to museums. I think that it has become refined to the point
   where people agree that Web visits don't replace, resemble, or
   recapitulate the museum experience, but may be a useful adjunct. The
   analogy used is "a coffee table book." Like a coffee table book, will
   it be decorative and ignored? Will it be expensive? Will it be a
   tasteful and unenlightening adjunct to every middle-class living room?

   I, personally, as a very technically literate person, and an avid
   museum lover, think that the question is quite complicated. For an art
   museum, are people really looking at the representations that are
   presented on the screen, shorn of all of their aura, texture and
   (gulp) existential heft? Not to mention shorn of all the social
   thingies that go into a museum visit. I'm not saying they aren't, I'm
   asking: are people doing this? Or are they flitting around, as I do,
   hyper-linking around the globe, until I come to the living images of a
   fishtank page?

   I, again just a personal, not deeply considered response, think that
   history museums, and science museums of all stripes have a better shot
   at getting real use from the Web, since for them the object is the
   root of a tree of information, kind of a package that hypertext is
   good at unwrapping.  OK, I'll stop with the metaphors, for what's a
   meta-phor if not to use?

   Eric Siegel
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