>Greenhalgh, Richard Guralnick, Ron Hipschman, Channa Jayasinha, Katherine

Robert Guralnick, not Richard

>
>The Response of Museums to the Web
>Geoffrey Lewis
>
>There is a long history of the use of computers in museums.  By the mid-1960s a
>number
>of institutions were making computerised records of their collections, eg
>in the
>UK:
>Imperial War Museum, London and the Sedgwick Museum of Geology, University of
>Cambridge; in the USA: the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and
>the
>Museum of Paleontology, University of California.  Two national organisations
>concerned
>with networking museum information were also created at this time, the
>Information
>Retrieval Group of the Museums Association (IRGMA) in the UK which led to the
>formation of the Museum Documentation Association (MDA) ten years later and the
>Museum Computer Network (MCN) which was concerned particularly with art museum
>collections in the USA.  ICOM, too, had a working party looking at the matter
>within its
>Documentation Committee (CIDOC).
>
>A wider ranging programme involving sites, monuments and art objects existed in
>France
>with the Inventaire General des Monuments et des Richesses Artistiques de la
>France
>under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture.  By 1972,  Canada had
>established its
>National Inventory Programme (now CHIN) which had a national inventory of
>museum
>
>collections among its goals.   It is interesting to note that just as museums
>were
>pioneering new approaches then in the recording and retrieval of information,
>this has
>been repeated with the application of the Web for museum purposes.
>
>The beginning of the 1990s saw many museums in a number of different countries
>with
>computerised collection information,  some of which were already making that
>information available online for public use in their galleries.  By this time
>also a number
>of national and supra-national networks were in existence, eg  Minitel in
>France
>or Prestel
>in the UK.  These provided opportunities for public access to stored textual
>information
>and some museums experimented with these.   An opportunity to present museum
>information and illustrations arose also through commercial online information
>services
>and, for example, both the Smithsonian and the Dallas Museum of Art had a
>presence on
>the CompuServe Information Service.
>
>But it was amongst university museums and those with access to the university
>networks
>that the real interchange of museum data began to develop, although mainly
>within the
>recognised academic disciplines.  It was, of course, as early as April
>1991 when
>John
>Chadwick commenced Museum-L on a University of New Mexico server, an idea which
>grew from the Anthropology list.  However, by 1993 museums had started to place
>collection-based and other information on the Internet. Initially this was
>achieved
>through menu-driven Gopher sites and the Smithsonian's National Museum of
>Natural
>History, the Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley, University of California, the
>Field
>Museum of Natural History, Chicago and the Exploratorium, San Francisco were
>among
>them.  Another important Gopher site was that of the Library of Congress which
>made
>available exhibits on the Vatican and other subjects in May, 1993.
>
>Museums and their collections played an important part as a test-bed in the
>development
>of web technology and in its early applications.  Thus by October 1993 the
>Museum of
>New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa was providing a full hypermedia facility based on
>a
>Hyper-G (now HyperWave) server at the Graz Institute of Technology in Austria.
>
>However, the Mosaic graphical browser was destined to become the watershed in
>providing easy access to the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web.  As
>this was
>developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA),
>University of
>Illinois, an art history exhibit from the Australian National University was
>incorporated
>into the Mosaic Demo Document in June 1993;  another, from the same source
>(soon
>to
>become ArtServe), was based on the Palace of Diocletian at Split, and
>subsequently used
>as also was a converted version of a Soviet Archives exhibit from the
>Library of
>Congress.
>Not surprisingly a hypermedia exhibit from the University of Illinois's own
>Krannert Art
>Museum was available by August.
>
>In the same month the SunSITE at the University of North Carolina at
>Chapel Hill
>
>established its web server with the UNC Virtual Museum as its link page.  This
>contained
>a Mathematical Art Gallery, another version of the Library of Congress's Soviet
>Archives
>and then EXPO.  The award winning EXPO was developed from other Library of
>Congress exhibits - "1492: An Ongoing Voyage", "Dead Sea Scrolls", "Rome
>Reborn";
>others added included a terrain map, the Diocletian Palace at Split and a
>palaeontology
>exhibit.   The UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology also made hypermedia exhibits
>available at this time and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in
>Paris
>established an experimental web server.
>
>The next six months saw a number of other museum initiatives.  Apart from
>regular
>updating of EXPO and the Berkeley Museum of Paleontology's exhibit - which
>included
>one on the Palaeontological Institute of Russia - new features appeared
>including the
>electronic museum exhibit "Charlotte: The Vermont Whale" by the University of
>Vermont
>and two exhibitions for the Singapore National Museum on its National Computer
>Board's web server.  The Exploratorium quickly established its web presence.
>The
>Archaeological Museum of Cagliari, Sardinia also featured on a local server
>while a little
>later, on the Italian mainland, the Physics Department of Naples University
>"Federico II"
>provided an online exhibition about early instruments in its Museum.  La Trobe
>University at Melbourne, Australia included its Art Museum on their web site.
>Another
>award winning venture, privately run from SunSITE is the WebMuseum, introduced
>as
>Le Louvre in March 1994 (also known as WebLouvre for a short time) which today
>provides a network of exhibitions and other resources.
>
>Since then the number of museum web sites has increased vastly and attention is
>drawn
>to the World Wide Web Virtual Library for museums [http://www.icom.org/vlmp/ ]
>where
>addresses for the hundreds of new museum sites now available can be found as
>well as
>those referred to above and still extant.  The response from museums to
>multimedia is not
>so extraordinary as those outside the profession might think.   Nevertheless it
>is good to
>have an outside view on this:  "the web museum landscape .... suggests several
>reasons
>why this community is setting many of the standards that will govern networked
>digital
>media communication over the World Wide Web in the future." [Robert A Duffy
>(Strategic Communications, Columbia, USA) in 'Magic Carpets and the Tools of
>Institutional Knowledge: Why the museum community is leading the field in
>networked
>multimedia', a paper given at the Plenary Session, International Online
>Information 95,
>London, December 1995.]
>
>C Copyright Geoffrey Lewis, 1996

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