Anne: Depending on your on-line catalog software, there should be a way to block out fields that might contain confidential information from remote users, or other categories of users. That would argue for a button on your web site which brings you, through telnet, to your catalog. On the other hand, extracting data from your on line catalog in a form that is searchable from the web site should be no problem, except for updating. If your web site is being "out-sourced" and maintained on someone elses server, that would certainly be a serious "firewall" to prevent access to your data. In the Garden's case, as far as I understand it, the library catalog is maintained on a separate server which can be accessed through telnet. Our own web site is still not implemented, so I'm not sure how the connection to the catalog will finally be established. I haven't heard of any serious security concerns, either about data integrity, confidential collections information, or hacking through the public pages to system level access. If you want more technical information, please send me, off list, the technical details of your two proposed set ups and I can forward that to the Garden's technical people. Eric Siegel Director of Corporate and Science Development The New York Botanical Garden [log in to unmask]