Message from  Nicola Brookes <[log in to unmask]> 
Wed, 22 Apr 1998 11:37:33 BST

>  Can anyone please tell me what the first museum website was, where it is
based and when it >  was established? I would also be extremely interested
in any known of resources detailing the 
>  history of web developments of museums and galleries.

=========================
About 18 months ago I gave a brief history of early museum web sites on
Museum-L which will be available in the archive.  As membership of the list
has changed a lot since then and it is of general interest, here is an
extract from it:

...... "But it was amongst university museums and those with access to the
university 
networks that the real interchange of museum data began to develop,
although 
mainly within the recognised academic disciplines.  It was, of course, as
early as April 1991 
when John Chadwick commenced Museum-L on a University of New 
Mexico server, an idea which grew from the Anthropology list.  However, by 
1993 museums had started to place collection-based and other information on

the Internet. Initially this was achieved through menu-driven Gopher sites
and 
the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Museum of 
Paleontology at Berkeley, University of California, the Field Museum of
Natural 
History, Chicago and the Exploratorium, San Francisco were among them.  
Another important Gopher site was that of the Library of Congress which
made 
available exhibits on the Vatican and other subjects in May, 1993.  

Museums and their collections played an important part as a test-bed in the

development of web technology and in its early applications.  Thus by
October 
1993 the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa was providing a full 
hypermedia facility based on a Hyper-G (now HyperWave) server at the Graz 
Institute of Technology in Austria. However, the Mosaic graphical browser
was 
destined to become the watershed in providing easy access to the multimedia

capabilities of the World Wide Web.  As this was developed at the National 
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois, an
art 
history exhibit from the Australian National University was incorporated
into the Mosaic Demo Document in June 1993;  another, from the same source
(soon to 
become ArtServe), was based on the Palace of Diocletian at Split, and 
subsequently used as also was a converted version of a Soviet Archives
exhibit 
from the Library of Congress.  Not surprisingly a hypermedia exhibit from
the 
University of Illinois's own Krannert Art Museum was available by August.

In the same month the SunSITE at the University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill established its web server with the UNC Virtual Museum as its link
page.  
This contained a Mathematical Art Gallery, another version of the Library
of 
Congress's Soviet Archives and then EXPO.  The award winning EXPO was 
developed from other Library of Congress exhibits - "1492: An Ongoing
Voyage", 
"Dead Sea Scrolls", "Rome Reborn"; others added included a terrain map, the

Diocletian Palace at Split and a palaeontology exhibit.   The UC Berkeley 
Museum of Paleontology also made hypermedia exhibits available at this time

and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris established an 
experimental web server.

The next six months saw a number of other museum initiatives.  Apart from 
regular updating of EXPO and the Berkeley Museum of Paleontology's exhibit
- 
which included one on the Palaeontological Institute of Russia - new
features 
appeared including the electronic museum exhibit "Charlotte: The Vermont 
Whale" by the University of Vermont and two exhibitions for the Singapore 
National Museum on its National Computer Board's web server.  The 
Exploratorium quickly established its web presence.  The Archaeological 
Museum of Cagliari, Sardinia also featured on a local server while a little
later, 
on the Italian mainland, the Physics Department of Naples University
"Federico 
II" provided an online exhibition about early instruments in its Museum. 
La 
Trobe University at Melbourne, Australia included its Art Museum on their
web 
site.  Another award winning venture, privately run from SunSITE is the 
WebMuseum, introduced as Le Louvre in March 1994 (also known as 
WebLouvre for a short time) which today provides a network of exhibitions
and 
other resources."......

Hope this will be helpful.

Geoffrey Lewis