Hi --- I just thought I would throw in my two cents on the issue of public access via on-line services. First of all, on-line services can be fantastically successful, at least in the short term. We now send, on average, five thousand files per DAY to clients on the Internet through our World Wide Web server alone. We, on average, pass 80Megabytes per DAY, again through the Web server. So, in case you have not guessed, we judge success as "information dissemination". I think we need to divide issues when it comes to on-line services. From personal experience, the people who do the work on the services operate independently from everyone else in the museum. Management of such a server ALWAYS passes through those people who have the technical expertise to transform the ideas into "virtual reality". For our work, management provides a loose superstructure for the server, but nothing much else. People involved in education, exhibition, research and such act as consultants. This works well, because it is hard to impose creativity. The people who actually do the work are in the best position to know what will work electronically and what will not. On-line services require both technical and aesthetic skill. Cheers, Robert Guralnick | Museum of Paleontology | University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 | [log in to unmask] | (510) 642-9696