Jennifer wrote:

> I am rather hooked on the idea of
>experiencing the physical and everything that goes with it. At best, so
>far, their websites have only sent me a post card from their museum. Can
>they do more than this? Do they want to do more than this?

        Its been a long time since I have jumped into this fray,
and my two cents may not mean a whole lot anymore, but this
discussion is apparently one which people love to discuss.
Personally, I am totally bored with it because my opinion
on the matter is now set, unlike two years ago when I was working
my way through this minefield.

        Musueums do not just store physical objects and what you see
at a museum is not often the real thing.  At natural history museums,
the specimens on display are often casts of the real objects.  The
notion here is what YOU, as a museum visitor, are willing to believe.
When you go to the movies, you hope that you can suspend disbelief
and feel "real" emotions, even though you KNOW that the people in the
movies are actors and actresses.

        With Web sites, if you truly believed that the web site was
a museum, so it would be.  But web sites are nothing like a physical
museum, and why should they be?  Why should you look for the same
information on a web site as in a real museum.

        We have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue and
also have spent a lot of time on our web site, which is pretty
well known.  Check it out for yourself and be the judge if a
web site can transcend a museum...

http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/

Cheers,

Robert Guralnick | Museum of Paleontology | Department of Integrative Biology
U.C. Berkeley | Berkeley, CA 94720 | [log in to unmask] | (510) 642-9696
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