Here is a summary written by Geoffrey Lewis, former President of ICOM in
1996 and revisied/updated in 1998.
Patrick Boylan
=========================
Museums and 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
established a working party to examine and promote the matter on a
multi-disciplinary basis in 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. 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. In 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
demonstration was based on the Palace of Diocletian at Split (also from the
same source, soon to become known as ArtServe) and 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 of that year.
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"; further additions
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 few months from August 1993 saw a number of other museum and
related 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 in San Francisco
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 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 museum sites can be
found.
The response from museums to multimedia is not so extraordinary as those
external to the profession might think. As one outside observer commented:
"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.]
The substance of this note was originally posted to Museum-L in 1996.
© Geoffrey Lewis, 1996, 1998
(Unaltered multiple copies may be made for educational purposes)
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Important Subscriber Information:
The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes).
If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).
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