Trish:

I would be very interested in dialoging with you about on-line exhibitions.  I
am Director of the Berea College Museum in Berea, Kentucky, USA.  We have been
dabbling in on-line exhibition for a year now and I have done a lot of thinking
about it.  Last Fall I did presentations at the Southeastern Museums Conference
and the Historical Confederation of KY Annual Meeting on the motivations and
implications of on-line exhibitions.  I am organizing a session this Summer at
the KY Assoc. of Museums Annual Conference on motivations for on-line
exhibitions.

For the Berea College Museum there are two words which answer the question of
"why do on-line exhibition"  -- Audience & Students.

Audience -- on-line exhibition is a viable way to expand your audience into new
sectors.  We are a small college museum, focused on Appalachian history and
culture, and located in a rural community.  Almost every visitor who visits
"Gallery V (for virtual)," our on-line gallery, would not have come to the
museum in person.  Almost 25% of our on-line visitors are international.  There
area people in Ecuador who are interested in Appalachian Culture who cannot come
to our museum.  For them, any encounter with the stuff is better than no
encounter at all.

Students -- our museum is operated primarily for students with the explicit
mission of being a learning lab for the undergraduate curriculem.  Once the
workstations are set up, it is easy and inexpensive to experiement and explore
in this medium of exhibition, and the medium is expanding everyday with VRML
spaces, QuickTimeVR 3-D objects, and realtime interaction with cameras and
robotics.  If our students can explore the implications of the on-line medium,
they will have an advantage in shaping the future.

We are collaborating with an organization serving all the Appalachian Colleges
to fund a project to create an on-line museum collections resource which will
include 2-D and 3-D artifact images, scanned photographs, and digital sound
clips related to Appalachian History and Culture.  Another collabrator will
develop workshops for College teachers on how to utilize this resource in
undergraduate teaching.  However, the resource will be accessable to the genral
public.  The intention is to explore how the Internet can make routine access to
non-textual sources possible for undergraduates and what the results of this
access might be.  Students (an many college faculty) cannot afford to travel to
collections, so their work is generally biased by over-reliance on textual
sources.  Museums hold a vast wealth of the non-textual and  the Internet
provides the potential to help balance and fill-out people's research.

Our web site is at "http://www.berea.edu/GalleryV/BCMGVHome.HTML"
We will be adding a live camera from our Student Artifact Lab soon, as well as
more collections related images.

Christopher Miller,
Museum Director
Berea College Musuem
Berea, Kentucky, USA
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