>>Would anyone like to open a discussion about the rapid growth of museum >>websites? Perhaps those who are developing material for home pages etc >as well >as other museum workers or devotees might like to discuss this >question re >purpose/rationale. I think it would be particularly >interesting to debate what is the >main consideration in deciding to >prepare programs for the Internet - public access? >museum profile? >publicity? education? I would be delighted too to hear how other Museums develop their web sites as we are in the process of re-making our (one year old site) at the moment. Are webmasters are using commercial vendors for this purpose or working in-house for example. As in the initial creation to our site, we are finding that this brings the curators, exhibition designers, educators and heads of all department together in the process and stimulates interesting introspective 'soul searching'. It seems that in the process of thinking about how our Museum will appear to the world we often need to define how we the museum and it's various departments for ourselves. Once the content has been more or less agreed upon we will be able to turn other issues such as target audiences, educational versus commercial, which language or languages to provide information (our museum provides labels in English, Hebrew and Arabic) and the hardest issue of all, how much leeway do we allow our visitors to answer us .... this is a most delicate problem as we dont have the manpower to answer the pottential flood of inquiries on all of our collections. We are just geting in the thorny issues of information flow, graphic interface and navigaional tools this week and we still have a long way to go. I would love to hear from others on the list how they developed (are developing) their websites, thankyou Trish for bringing this up. Susan Hazan Head of Multimedia Education Unit Ruth Youth Wing The Israel Museum Jerusalem webmistress www.imj.org.il