The Museum of Victoria has been involved for some time in the near
universal pastime of playing around with prototype WWW pages (even to the
level of retrieving data query result sets from collection databases and
formatting them into html on the fly).

We now have to decide how serious we are about all this because
resources are (of course) scarce and to actively maintain a web presence
requires ongoing resources which have to be justified.

I would greatly appreciate any advice/help/comment on how other cultural
institutions have tackled this thorny issue (or did you just go ahead and
do it anyway?)

I am particularly interested in the issues raised by use of the web as a
means of reaching more and maybe different people purely as an extension
of the role of a publicly funded institution which should be highly
accessible, targetting of special interest groups (like schools) and
lastly the issue of possibly raising revenue.

This should be a hot topic so I'm hoping for a very active response!


Tim

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*            Tim Bosher           *      Museum of Victoria          *
* [log in to unmask]  *  Information Systems Branch      *
*      Phone: +61 3 651 6751      *      Fax: +61 3 651 6180         *
*                                                                    *
*      There is no time like the present to postpone                 *
*      what you should be doing.                                     *
*                                                                    *
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