>  We could soon see Museums with a greater
>virtual attendance than actual attendance.

We already have... for the past year and a half in fact.

>A Web site must therefore be
>seen as a stand-alone medium, not a replacement or substitute for the
>Museum experience, but (hopefully) an enriching experience in and of
>itself.

Indeed.  I have been arguing this for a very long time.  A lot of people
have seen the Web site/physical museum distinction (an important one!) as a
rationale for dismissing  museum web pages.  I hardly think this is fair.
Jim Angus has stated it most clearly in his previous posts... the Web
provides museums with a new set of tools to present rich, detailed deep
information in an informative and interesting manner.

For all those who enjoy the visceral pleasure of going to see the real
thing.... in natural history museums many of the items that you see are
actually casts of specimens.  Museums have a long history of "semi-real"...
what many museums do best of all is preserve, catalog, contextualize and
make valuable cultural or natural heritage.... and web sites can do this
too.

Cheers,



Robert Guralnick | Museum of Paleontology | Department of Integrative Biology
University of California | Berkeley, CA 94720 | (510) 643-9746 |
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