Hi ---
 
        I just thought I would throw in my two cents on
the issue of public access via on-line services.  First of
all, on-line services can be fantastically successful, at
least in the short term.  We now send, on average, five
thousand files per DAY to clients on the Internet through
our World Wide Web server alone.  We, on average, pass
80Megabytes per DAY, again through the Web server.
So, in case you have not guessed, we judge success as
"information dissemination".
        I think we need to divide issues when it comes to
on-line services.  From personal experience, the people who
do the work on the services operate independently from
everyone else in the museum.  Management of such a server
ALWAYS passes through those people who have the technical
expertise to transform the ideas into "virtual reality".
For our work, management provides a loose superstructure
for the server, but nothing much else.  People involved
in education, exhibition, research and such act as
consultants.  This works well, because it is hard to
impose creativity.  The people who actually do the work are
in the best position to know what will work electronically and
what will not. On-line services require both technical and
aesthetic skill.
 
Cheers,
 
Robert Guralnick | Museum of Paleontology | University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720 | [log in to unmask] | (510) 642-9696