>I am doing research to try to answer the question, do online exhibits prevent
>or discourage people from visiting REAL museum exhibits? If you have any
>anecdotal evidence, personal observation or experience,

I've done web-related museum work since '95 and have never heard of
attendance suffering as a result of a web presence.

Part of the time, I worked at the New England Aquarium and while at
times the website has had virtual exhibit tours, streaming video, and
supplementary exhibit material, we never saw a drop in attendance. In
fact, many visitors to the aquarium, when asked, mentioned that they
became interested and aware of an exhibit through the website.

Early on, we realized at the aquarium that a virtual experience
*almost never* beats a live experience. You can't get kissed by a sea
lion or experience how penguins interact by watching that stuff on a
web-cam.

There's plenty of information about Van Gogh and Monet online, but
whenever those exhibits travel to the local art museum, attendance
skyrockets.

More recently, I've been working at a new media company involved with
exhibits. One of our exhibits in particular has driven attendance to
multiple museums. We created a Virtual Fishtank installation for
Boston's Museum of Science in which visitors can create virtual fish
with basic rulesets and release them into a large room-sized virtual
aquarium to see how they interact. The interesting part is that the
fishtank also exists online and has a sister installation at the St.
Louis Science Center. Visitors to any of the three places can release
their creatures into any of the destination tanks. We frequently get
word of people who made a special trip to the museum to see how what
they created online fared in the actual exhibit.
<http://www.virtualfishtank.com/>.

The other major point is to remember that attendance typically draws
from a local audience or tourists to the region. Doing stuff online
dramatically broadens the reach of the institution creating much
greater awareness. The Virtual Fishtank in particular has reached a
european and asian audience that would have never known about the
Museum of Science, otherwise.

I think the important thing to realize when creating a online
component to an exhibit is to design it in such a way that it
supplements or complements the experience in the actual institution.
It only serves to strengthen both experiences.

-bw.
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Bruce Wyman                                e: <[log in to unmask]>
Manager of Creative Development            v:  617.491.3184
Nearlife                                   f:  617.354.4191
147 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA  02140   w: <http://www.nearlife.com/>

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