Announcement: Museums and the World Wide Web (WWW)
 
 
Information on museums is now held as part of the World-Wide Web (WWW)
global hypermedia Virtual Library under the following "URL" (Uniform
Resource Locator):
 
  http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums.html
 
The page may be accessed on the global Internet "network of networks"
by WWW client programs such as mosaic or xmosaic under X windows and
lynx on ASCII terminals under Unix. Client programs are also available
for use under MS-Windows on PCs and on Apple Macintosh computers.
Access is possible via a modem to an Internet site and such services
are now available commercially.  Contact your system manager or local
Internet provider if WWW is not accessible from your computer.
 
WWW pages include underlined phrases which are hyperlinks to other
URLs. These may be anywhere in the world on the Internet computer
network, accessible via anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NNTP
(USENET on-line newsgroups), Gopher (menu selection), WAIS (database),
Telnet (remote interactive session), or WWW's own HTTP protocol, using
HTML, based on the widely used SGML mark-up language. As well as HTML
format, files may be in PostScript (formatted documents), GIF (colour
graphical images), XBM (black and white images), JPEG (compressed
colour images), MPEG (moving colour images), Sun audio (sounds), etc.,
and may be compressed using common utilities such as compress and gzip
to save disk space.  Different formats are handled by appropriate
programs on the client machine.
 
Interaction is possible via "forms" pages in which menus, buttons and
text boxes are presented to the user for selection and completion.
Arbitrary programs may be run at the remote server site depending on
the results of these interactions, thus enabling the possibility of
remote interactive exhibits.
 
The WWW Virtual Library museums page includes hyperlinks to other
museums around the world and also virtual exhibits only available on
the network from countries as far apart as France, Israel, Italy, New
Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, the UK and USA. New exhibits are
being added all the time. The possibilities for museums to present a
proportion of their collections and exhibitions remotely around the
world is as yet largely untapped, but is gradually growing. The San
Francisco Exploratorium, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC
and the UK National History Museum provide three such examples. The
"information superhighway" is likely to have an increasingly
significant effect on museums of international, national, and
eventually local status in the future, allowing resources to be made
available remotely throughout the world.
 
For those interested in statistics, currently there are over 20 million
people with Internet access and the number is doubling each year. WWW
usage has been estimated to be increasing at 11% per week! The museums
page is currently accessed about 300 times a day times and is easily
the most popular page at our site.
 
Jonathan Bowen, Oxford University Computing Laboratory.
October 1994.
 
 
Please email [log in to unmask] if you know of relevant
on-line information which could be added to the page.
 
 
--
Jonathan Bowen <[log in to unmask]>
Oxford University Computing Laboratory
URL: http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/people/jonathan.bowen.html