The posting below was not distributed to Museum-L digest subscribers and is
repeated here. My apologies to those who have seen it before.
I would like to thank all who responded to my request for information about
early museum web sites on 23 August. A number of you asked for a copy of the
article and others for citation details. The request arose because of the
revision of my articles on museums in _Britannia Online_ and _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_ and the inclusion of a section on virtual museums. As they will not
be published immediately, I have produced the note below to meet any short-term
needs.
There are still one or two gaps in the story and I would appreciate any further
comments or corrections.
My appreciation goes to the following who provided the information that made
this article possible although any misinterpretation of that information is
mine: Jim Angus, Joe Ansel, Stephen Borysewicz, Patrick Boylan, John Chadwick,
Kevin Comerford, Michael Greenhalgh, Robert Guralnick, Ron Hipschman, Channa
Jayasinha, Katherine Jones-Garmil, Paul Jones, Judd Knott, Kipp McIntyre, Robin
Murphy, Andrew Roberts
Geoffrey Lewis
internet:[log in to unmask]
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The Response of Museums to the Web
Geoffrey Lewis
There is a long history of the use of computers in museums. By the mid-1960s a
number of institutions were making computerised records of their collections, eg
in the UK: Imperial War Museum, London and the Sedgwick Museum of
Geology, University of Cambridge; in the USA: the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Paleontology, University of
California. Two national organisations concerned with networking museum
information were also created at this time, the Information Retrieval Group of
the Museums Association (IRGMA) in the UK which led to the formation of the
Museum Documentation Association (MDA) ten years later and the Museum
Computer Network (MCN) which was concerned particularly with art museum
collections in the USA. ICOM, too, had a working party looking at the matter
within its Documentation Committee (CIDOC).
A wider ranging programme involving sites, monuments and art objects existed
in France with the Inventaire General des Monuments et des Richesses
Artistiques de la France under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture. By
1972, Canada had established its National Inventory Programme (now CHIN)
which had a national inventory of museum collections among its goals. It is
interesting to note that just as museums were pioneering new approaches then
in the recording and retrieval of information, this has been repeated with the
application of the Web for museum purposes.
The beginning of the 1990s saw many museums in a number of different
countries with computerised collection information, some of which were
already making that information available online for public use in their
galleries.
By this time also a number of national and supra-national networks were in
existence, eg Minitel in France or Prestel in the UK. These provided
opportunities for public access to stored textual information and some museums
experimented with these. An opportunity to present museum information and
illustrations arose also through commercial online information services and, for
example, both the Smithsonian and the Dallas Museum of Art had a presence on the
CompuServe Information Service.
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.
Since then the number of museum web sites has increased vastly and attention
is drawn to the World Wide Web Virtual Library for museums
[http://www.icom.org/vlmp/ ] where addresses for the hundreds of new
museum sites now available can be found as well as those referred to above
and still extant. The response from museums to multimedia is not so
extraordinary as those outside the profession might think. Nevertheless it is
good to have an outside view on this: "the web museum landscape .... suggests
several reasons why this community is setting many of the standards that will
govern networked digital media communication over the World Wide Web in
the future." [Robert A Duffy (Strategic Communications, Columbia, USA) in
'Magic Carpets and the Tools of Institutional Knowledge: Why the museum
community is leading the field in networked multimedia', a paper given at the
Plenary Session, International Online Information 95, London, December 1995.]
C Copyright: Geoffrey Lewis, 1996
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