I think a museum's Web site has the potential to be more than a public relations tool to help people plan a travel itinerary. Web sites can function as information arteries between museums or other sites which have analagous information or are dealing with similar topics. This is a futuristic idea but try it out! Its the year 2010 and a small museum in Western China is holding an exhibit on neolithic ceramics. Menewhile, the Seattle Art Museum is holding a similar exhibit on Chinese and Korean neolithic cermaics and the Louvre is holding one on neolithic ceramics found around France. All of these museum exhibits could be connected through the Internet. Touring the exhibit in Seattle one could step up to a kiosk and be in China! This kiosk may then connect the person to a pre-columbian dig site in Honduras. The possibilities are endless. The interconectivity of the Web will allow us to step out of the box-like, categorical conception of traditional museum exhbits into the next generation of exhbitis without walls. Goodbye Newton and hello fractals. >Dale Kutzera is right. A museum's Web site is analogous to a publication >ABOUT a museum, or a string of linked publications--brochures, catalogs, >etc.--NOT like a MUSEUM. If WE think a Web site is LIKE our museum, >we'll give a very distorted idea of museums. BTW, IF people use the WWW >to plan travel itineraries--as I think they might--this COULD boost >"real" museum tourism.--David Haberstich ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Laura Lewis Museum Education Specialist [log in to unmask]