You ask why our Collections Data @ Marine Information is at Queen's
University rather that at the Canadian Heritage Information Network. For
some of the reasons you mention in the Spring 94 issue of Spectra -
"partly for compatibility reasons and partly for financial reasons" but
the main reason is that the universities are better at delivering
information to a lot of high volume users. Bless CHIN, they have done
and continue to do good work for museum professionals but our main
interest  was in attracting users to our research facilities - and it
has worked. Students are logging in from Queen's and somehow convincing
their profs that we have material they can use. Others log in from
other parts of Canada and the US.
There are others reasons. We have a small staff but very good volunteers.
We needed a lower information recording standard than CHIN demands so we could
get some 40,000 records uploaded without delay. Marketing was a consideration
but in this case we are marketing our collections to students, historians etc.
There is a little bit of a survival strategy in this too.
Finally we are taking a holistic approach. Enter the keyword sextant and
all of the books, photographs, archival documents on the subject will
appear.
Our next step is a terminal in the lobby of the museum and currently we are
working on an interface that will guide the visitor to the information
without having to ask many questions of our hard pressed staff.
The telenet address to get into the first screen of the Queen's University
library system (Qline) is qlineascii.queensu.ca (130.15.248.12). When
you get in move to the 2nd screen and then enter our data base
by entering MAR at the prompt. Keyword searching so try K=sextant
for starters.
If you have any problems please let me know. Queens is very responsive and
they want the system to work. You may find the PF keys do not work so
use the escape key instead.
We are currently at the planning stages of a "marine history gopher"
Maurice D. Smith,
Curator,
Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston.