>>Would anyone like to open a discussion about the rapid growth of museum
>>websites? Perhaps those who are developing material for home pages etc
>as well >as other museum workers or devotees might like to discuss this
>question re  >purpose/rationale.  I think it would be particularly
>interesting to debate what is the >main consideration in deciding to
>prepare programs for the Internet - public access?  >museum profile?
>publicity?  education?

I would be delighted too to hear how other Museums develop their web sites
as we are in the process of re-making our (one year old site) at the
moment.
Are webmasters are using commercial vendors for this purpose or working
in-house for example.

As in the initial creation to our site, we are finding that this brings the
curators, exhibition designers, educators and heads of all department
together in the process and stimulates interesting introspective 'soul
searching'. It seems that in the process of thinking about how our Museum
will appear to the world we often need to define how we the museum and it's
various departments  for ourselves.

Once the content has been more or less agreed upon we will be able to turn
other issues such as target audiences, educational versus commercial, which
language or languages to provide information (our museum provides labels in
English, Hebrew and Arabic) and the hardest issue of all, how much leeway
do we allow our visitors to answer us .... this is a most delicate problem
as we dont have the manpower to answer the pottential flood of inquiries on
all of our collections.

We are just geting in the thorny issues of information flow, graphic
interface and navigaional tools this week and we still have a long way to
go.

I would love to hear from others on the list how they developed (are
developing) their websites, thankyou Trish for bringing this up.

Susan Hazan
Head of Multimedia Education Unit
Ruth Youth Wing
The Israel Museum
Jerusalem

webmistress    www.imj.org.il