Cross posted to CIDOC-L and Museum-L. Please feel free to forward, and pardon the press-release jargon. It is really a good grant for us all. Eric Siegel [log in to unmask] DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE GRANT HELPS PROVIDE PUBLIC COMPUTER ACCESS AT MUSEUMS & GARDENS October 12, 1994 -- A $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) was announced today to help a consortium of America's leading natural history museums and botanical gardens to provide public access to the computer information superhighway. The consortium includes The New York Botanical Garden, New York; The Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; The American Museum of Natural History, New York; Bernice Bishop Museum, Honolulu; California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco; Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh; Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis; and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles. The installation of ultra high speed telecommunications will provide new and innovative access to services such as the Internet and other museum, scientific, education, research, and environmental databases. Underserved audiences in major urban areas will soon have the ability to experience and benefit from the vast storehouses of data at the consortium institutions and beyond. A unique consortium of nine free-standing natural history museums and botanical gardens created the proposal that ultimately led to the US Department of Commerce grant. The $200,000 will be matched by non-Federal sources. Each institution will provide facilities, staff time, non-technical equipment, and their own respective databases as part of the consortium's contribution. The consortium project will serve as the first stage of a plan prepared by the MITRE Corporation and funded by the National Science Foundation. The project will develop a model to interconnect multidisciplinary, geographically distant resources using compatible systems, database models, and access tools. The project will encourage more users, particularly underserved groups, to venture online and participate in consortium programs. The grant will provide preliminary funding to create a uniform technology of computers and computer communications equipment linking the nine consortium museums and botanical gardens. Using T1 telecommunications technology, the project will introduce state-of-the-science linkages from each organization to information and research databases around the globe.