You would think one could remember to include the most important piece of
information...the URL.  Sorry for the duplicate post.

THE URL:

http://www.lam.mus.ca.us/webmuseums


------------------------------------

The Guide to Museums and Cultural Resources provides a comprehensive index
for information about museums, aquaria, historical parks and other cultural
institutions. It was designed to accomodate information about a variety of
resources of interest to the arts/cultural/scientific/educational community.

The Guide to Museums and Cultural Resources will assist the traveler in
searching for and locating museums and cultural resources. The basic menus
are set up according to the geographic location of the resource. There are
two
reasons for this:

1.To permit new information to be added to a single list, rather than to
several subject lists.
2.To permit the traveler to easily find museums and cultural resources when
planning a physical journey.

It is hoped that attendance at these public institutions may be increased
by publication on the World Wide Web.

This site also features a powerful search engine. The engine searches an
external database, not the web page, so the searches are fast. The data can
be sorted to pull out resources by subject or geographic location.

The guide is designed to permit the community to directly add data. I
encourage anyone associated with an institution or resource which is not
listed to add that information.  If you are unhappy with an existing
listing, either ask me to delete the old entry before adding the
replacement, or add a new entry with a slightly different name and ask me
to delete the old entry.

The guide has received considerable attention and will soon be listed by
AOL.  At present, the guide gets about 100,000 hits per month.  I would
appreciate any links back to the guide and would like to receive your
comments.  I can easily modify the site to include a wider variety of
information.  Since I have a science background, the site is biased towards
the sciences, but this can be changed.

The site uses a PERL script based upon the shareware script developed by
Matt Kruse.  It is composed of over 2000 lines of code and represents a
considerable amount of intensive labor (my partner noted my absence from
home).  Much of that effort was spent converting my old Filemaker Pro
database.

For those of you interested in the more technical details...

When records are added, two things happen.  First the script creates a new
subdirectory and index page on our server (when required) and adds a subset
of the information.  Second, the script updates a database file with the
complete information.  This means that one searches the database, not the
html pages.  It also means that no html authoring is done, and the data can
be easily exported into other databases when the time comes to create
another new final version.

I hope you visit our new improved guide...

Jim Angus



Jim Angus
Information Technology and Hypermedia Programs
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA  90007

voice:  213/744-3317
fax:    213/746-2999
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