Cross posted to CIDOC-L and Museum-L. Please feel free to
          forward, and pardon the press-release jargon. It is really a
          good grant for us all.
 
          Eric Siegel
          [log in to unmask]
 
 
 
 
               DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE GRANT HELPS
       PROVIDE PUBLIC COMPUTER ACCESS AT MUSEUMS & GARDENS
 
 
October 12, 1994 -- A $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of
Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA) was announced today to help a consortium of
America's leading natural history museums and botanical gardens
to provide public access to the computer information
superhighway.
 
The consortium includes The New York Botanical Garden, New York;
The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; The American
Museum of Natural History, New York; Bernice Bishop Museum,
Honolulu; California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco; Carnegie
Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh; Field Museum of Natural
History, Chicago; Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis; and the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles.
 
The installation of ultra high speed telecommunications will
provide new and innovative access to services such as the
Internet and other museum, scientific, education, research, and
environmental databases. Underserved audiences in major urban
areas will soon have the ability to experience and benefit from
the vast storehouses of data at the consortium institutions and
beyond.
 
A unique consortium of nine free-standing natural history museums
and botanical gardens created the proposal that ultimately led to
the US Department of Commerce grant. The $200,000 will be matched
by non-Federal sources. Each institution will provide facilities,
staff time, non-technical equipment, and their own respective
databases as part of the consortium's contribution.
 
The consortium project will serve as the first stage of a plan
prepared by the MITRE Corporation and funded by the National
Science Foundation. The project will develop a model to
interconnect multidisciplinary, geographically distant resources
using compatible systems, database models, and access tools. The
project will encourage more users, particularly underserved
groups, to venture online and participate in consortium programs.
 
The grant will provide preliminary funding to create a uniform
technology of computers and computer communications equipment
linking the nine consortium museums and botanical gardens. Using
T1 telecommunications technology, the project will introduce
state-of-the-science linkages from each organization to
information and research databases around the globe.