While I can't speak for the results of electronic access to collections
information, I can speak on hands-on access to collections by the public.
At the Naturalist Center, we currently serve about 12-13,000 visitors annually.
That number had been increasing steadily up to about 3 years ago when school
group visitation dropped due to lack of field trip money.  I am sure that the
presence of the Naturalist Center has increased the requests for information
(although I have no real figures to support it...) simply because people have
come to know it is there whenever a question pops up.  We still find that we
are getting a sizable number of first time visitors to our center and our
Saturday visitorship remains strong.  I would also say that its presence has
in many ways changed the types of questions that the public asks.  While
before, they would ask for simple identifications or the "please send me
all the info you have about dinosaurs"-type of question, we have seen an
increasing number of our visitors using our resources for more complex
studies and investigations.  As I mentioned in an earlier correspondence
on the list, we currently have one high school student studying the
paleoecology of the Maryland costal plain during the Miocene Epoch.  His
findings, derived independently, conform to the currently accepted
interpretations made by professional paleontologists.  If the Naturalist
Center was not available, I doubt that the student would have been given
access to the main collections, and his research would have been more
difficult to do.
 
    If the information is going to be accessible to the public in a way that
is more functional than a bibliography, museums will need to provide some
"instruction" in how the data, images, or whatever can be used...demonstrate
the potential, if you will.
 
    I am currently working with teachers and students and officials at
Ball State University in Indiana to explore how to teach the public to
"read" museum objects, ask questions, and construct the information in ways
that are meaningful to them...and to explore how that can be transferred into
a electronic form...determining what the users want, what types of images they
need to answer their questions, and designing a user interface from off the
shelf software and hardware.
 
Richard Efthim, Naturalist Center
National Museum of Natural History
Washington, DC 20560
(202)357-1503   fax:(202)786-2778   [log in to unmask]