>  That's why museums exist--to preserve access to unique historic information.

Only in part.  They also provide some kind of context in which to
understand the unique historical information.   No information is unique!
Think about it:  all the fossils we have found have been evidence with
which to test the theory of evolution.   These bones have meaning outside
the fact that they represent traces of individuals long dead or species
long gone.   As both preservers and educators, we have many avenues for
presenting deep contextual information, and one is the Web.

>
>WWW sites for museums and other organizations simply provide access to a PART
>of this historic information in a nifty format.  Thus far, the way the Web is
>being used by museums is as a substitute for brochures, catalogs, phone
>books, and phone calls.  Period.

Absolutely wrong.   Many museums are using their web sites as ways to
present information in new formats... in fact, we have the chance to
present a lot of the material in our collections and not accessible to the
public using the Web... and we do it inside a infrastructure that makes a
lot of sense.   The web site can either present PR about the museum, or it
can present information that is different than information in the museum.
Or it can do both.  But the Web has properties and qualities that make it
different than a museum.  Like all different media, some of these qualities
are positive and some negative.  Sure, you are not looking at the "real
object" when you visit the web site.  However, with a Web site, you can
navigate down to a detailed level of information about a particular object
(meta-information) or learn a lot more about context than you could in a
museum.   If you doubt the veracity of my words, I urge you to visit UCMP's
web site and judge for yourself (http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/).   Then I
would like to find out
if you honestly believe all web sites to "substitute for brochures,
catalogs, phonebooks, and phone calls."

>Museums will continue as sites for tourists
>to visit and places for serious scholars, students, and true "amateurs" who
>appreciate and understand original objects--be they art works or cultural,
>geological, biological, etc., artifacts.  A limited amount of information
>about a limited number of these artifacts will be found conveniently on the
>Web--with links to other objects and other sites

I think you have slipped from your original terminology "unique historic
information" to
what you meant all along... objects.  Objects are great, but I wonder how
much more important
is object, meta-information on the object (date collected, author, etc...)
and context in which the object
existed and now exists.

> but I think
>whether or not museum Web sites increase or decrease visitorship to the
>actual museums remains to be seen.  It may have no discernible impact at all.

Who cares?  Is the ultimate end of the web museum to increase attendance?

>  My advice to museums is to consider what impact
>Internet freebies will have on educational and souvenir products that they're
>trying to sell to support collections and programs.

But the Web is not analogous nor homologous to a book or to anything in a
gift shop either.

>In my own museum, the Web site development team is under no illusion that our
>pictures and text on the Web will substitute for a museum exhibit.

The question is not substitute, but provide greater depth or different
information... supplement might be a better word.
>
>I sincerely hope that some of the hype and hysteria about the WWW will
>subside before museum people get their perspectives too warped out of shape.

It wont.

> The Web is nothing more than a fancy tool for providing and accessing
>information;

So is a computer, so is your TV, so is your car stereo,  and so are books.
This is not nothing.  As a historian, you must realize the push to store
and retrieve information has driven much of our culture over the last
several hundred years?

>--nor would it surprise me if they
>end up as this year's hula hoop (or this year's equivalent of the
>stereoscopic armchair tour).

Actually, the Web has been steadily growing for the past three years now.
Exponentially.

 The Web may be the greatest thing since sliced
>bread--but it will never BECOME sliced bread...or a museum.

That is the point.

>Just my opinion, of course, but possibly a damned good one (modest blush).

Possibly.


Robert Guralnick | Museum of Paleontology | Department of Integrative Biology
University of California | Berkeley, CA 94720 | (510) 643-9746 |
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