This is slightly off the original subject but in his posting Benj. Fuller said >about a (some) (several) regional projects to put together a CDROM >series about >museum offerings in a region, state, on a topic, or for the single large >regional museum? Publish as a series seasonally? Is there a part of >AAM >concerned w. raising the level of the water in the pond? Would a >project like >this qualify for the Oracle grant? Part of this work has likely been >done as >some museums have produced promotional/souvenir videos ( >which probably should >have been given away instead of sold at gift shops!) there is a company, Digital Collections, Inc., in Alameda, CA that produces CDROMs of Art collections. The CDROMs are currently marketed to Universities and Libraries as tools for studing the art. There are other companies that will produce the CDROMs for the museum. There are also museums which produce this type of CDROM collection for sale in the museum shop, or for use by schools before the students visit the museum, I believe the Art Institute in Chicago has a program (not on CDROM) of the museum that is sent to schools for $1.00 per disk to cover the cost of the disks. This type of collection has also proved popular with the visitors to the collections as a souvenir of the visit. Judging from the popularity of such CDROMS and the above mentioned Videos, I would assume the museum visitors will look at the WWW pages AFTER visiting the museum, and thus we would not have to worry about the impact to admissions. We should also look at the possibility of improving the educational experiences of school groups through use of WWW sites. If students can see the objects first and get excited about the upcoming museum visit we maybe able to increase the amount of new knowledge they go home with. Chrissie Devinney [log in to unmask]