Martha --- In reply to your comments... I AGREE that museums have found better ways to make exhibition and even research information available to the general public. Partially, museums have finally begun to learn how to self promote. This means going to newspapers and other media agencies with important new exhibition announcements and such. I was loathe to bring up my opinion about how to effectively reintegrate museum exhibition and research because people are REALLY going to think I sound like a broken record. However, since I was asked, here are my thoughts. First, the problem is this. Museums carry out research to a smaller or greater degree. At least, this holds true for Natural History museums. This research is usually stuff that is fairly obtuse and specifically for an audience of peers. This is not to denegrate the work that researchers do. I just dont think that people want to read the latest phylogenetic reconstruction of heteromyid rodents in their spare time, for example. Exhibitions are ways to make research information accessible to the public. This too is a very creative task and one that is as important as the research itself. However, exhibitions as traditionally done cannot effectively have enough depth to let people delve as far into the matter as possible. Everyone HOPES that a museum goer will head home and try to find some references to stuff s/he found interesting. The work that I have been doing with building an on-line museum over Internet can incorporate infinite depth. The use of hypertext enables users to move effortlessly through a loose hierarchy of information. Therefore, the exhibition slowly blends into research. Cheers, Robert Guralnick Museum of Paleontology University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 [log in to unmask] (510) 642-9696