This is slightly off the original subject but in his posting Benj. Fuller
said
 
>about a (some) (several) regional projects to put together a CDROM >series
about
>museum offerings in a region, state, on a topic, or for the single large
>regional museum? Publish as a series seasonally? Is there a part of >AAM
>concerned w. raising the level of the water in the pond? Would a >project
like
>this qualify for the Oracle grant? Part of this work has likely been >done
as
>some museums have produced promotional/souvenir videos ( >which probably
should
>have been given away instead of sold at gift shops!)
 
there is a company, Digital Collections, Inc., in Alameda, CA that produces
CDROMs of Art collections.  The CDROMs are currently marketed to Universities
and Libraries as tools for studing the art.  There are other companies that
will produce the CDROMs for the museum.  There are also museums which produce
this type of CDROM collection for sale in the museum shop, or for use by
schools before the students visit the museum, I believe the Art Institute in
Chicago has a program (not on CDROM) of the museum that is sent to schools
for $1.00 per disk to cover the cost of the disks.
 
This type of collection has also proved popular with the visitors to the
collections as a souvenir of the visit.  Judging from the popularity of such
CDROMS and the above mentioned Videos, I would assume the museum visitors
will look at the WWW pages AFTER visiting the museum, and thus we would not
have to worry about the impact to admissions.  We should also look at the
possibility of improving the educational experiences of school groups through
use of WWW sites.  If students can see the objects first and get excited
about the upcoming museum visit we maybe able to increase the amount of new
knowledge they go home with.
 
Chrissie Devinney
[log in to unmask]