This conversation re-emerges every six months or so: the relationship of WWW to museums. I think that it has become refined to the point where people agree that Web visits don't replace, resemble, or recapitulate the museum experience, but may be a useful adjunct. The analogy used is "a coffee table book." Like a coffee table book, will it be decorative and ignored? Will it be expensive? Will it be a tasteful and unenlightening adjunct to every middle-class living room? I, personally, as a very technically literate person, and an avid museum lover, think that the question is quite complicated. For an art museum, are people really looking at the representations that are presented on the screen, shorn of all of their aura, texture and (gulp) existential heft? Not to mention shorn of all the social thingies that go into a museum visit. I'm not saying they aren't, I'm asking: are people doing this? Or are they flitting around, as I do, hyper-linking around the globe, until I come to the living images of a fishtank page? I, again just a personal, not deeply considered response, think that history museums, and science museums of all stripes have a better shot at getting real use from the Web, since for them the object is the root of a tree of information, kind of a package that hypertext is good at unwrapping. OK, I'll stop with the metaphors, for what's a meta-phor if not to use? Eric Siegel [log in to unmask]