Announcement: Museums and the World Wide Web (WWW) Information on museums is now held as part of the World-Wide Web (WWW) global hypermedia Virtual Library under the following "URL" (Uniform Resource Locator): http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums.html The page may be accessed on the global Internet "network of networks" by WWW client programs such as mosaic or xmosaic under X windows and lynx on ASCII terminals under Unix. Client programs are also available for use under MS-Windows on PCs and on Apple Macintosh computers. Access is possible via a modem to an Internet site and such services are now available commercially. Contact your system manager or local Internet provider if WWW is not accessible from your computer. WWW pages include underlined phrases which are hyperlinks to other URLs. These may be anywhere in the world on the Internet computer network, accessible via anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NNTP (USENET on-line newsgroups), Gopher (menu selection), WAIS (database), Telnet (remote interactive session), or WWW's own HTTP protocol, using HTML, based on the widely used SGML mark-up language. As well as HTML format, files may be in PostScript (formatted documents), GIF (colour graphical images), XBM (black and white images), JPEG (compressed colour images), MPEG (moving colour images), Sun audio (sounds), etc., and may be compressed using common utilities such as compress and gzip to save disk space. Different formats are handled by appropriate programs on the client machine. Interaction is possible via "forms" pages in which menus, buttons and text boxes are presented to the user for selection and completion. Arbitrary programs may be run at the remote server site depending on the results of these interactions, thus enabling the possibility of remote interactive exhibits. The WWW Virtual Library museums page includes hyperlinks to other museums around the world and also virtual exhibits only available on the network from countries as far apart as France, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, the UK and USA. New exhibits are being added all the time. The possibilities for museums to present a proportion of their collections and exhibitions remotely around the world is as yet largely untapped, but is gradually growing. The San Francisco Exploratorium, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the UK National History Museum provide three such examples. The "information superhighway" is likely to have an increasingly significant effect on museums of international, national, and eventually local status in the future, allowing resources to be made available remotely throughout the world. For those interested in statistics, currently there are over 20 million people with Internet access and the number is doubling each year. WWW usage has been estimated to be increasing at 11% per week! The museums page is currently accessed about 300 times a day times and is easily the most popular page at our site. Jonathan Bowen, Oxford University Computing Laboratory. October 1994. Please email [log in to unmask] if you know of relevant on-line information which could be added to the page. -- Jonathan Bowen <[log in to unmask]> Oxford University Computing Laboratory URL: http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/people/jonathan.bowen.html