I would like to thank all who responded to my request for information about
early
museum web sites on 23 August.  A number of you asked for a copy of the article
and
others for citation details.  The request arose because of the revision of my
articles on
museums in _Britannia Online_ and _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and the inclusion
of a
section on virtual museums.  As they will not be published immediately, I have
produced
the note below to meet the any short-term needs.

There are still one or two gaps in the story and I would appreciate any further
comments
or corrections.

My appreciation goes to the following who provided the information that made
this article
possible although any misinterpretation of that information is mine:  Jim Angus,
Joe
Ansel, Stephen Borysewicz, Patrick Boylan, John Chadwick, Kevin Comerford,
Michael
Greenhalgh, Richard Guralnick, Ron Hipschman, Channa Jayasinha, Katherine Jones-
Garmil, Paul Jones, Judd Knott, Kipp McIntyre, Robin Murphy, Andrew Roberts

Geoffrey Lewis
internet:[log in to unmask]

======================================

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