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Museum resources and the Internet
Leonard D. Will
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This is a revised version of a paper presented at the
annual conference of
CIDOC, the Documentation Committee of the
International Council of Museums (ICOM) held at the National
Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, on 26th September 1996. The audience contained some people who were very
familiar with the Internet and others who had never used it, so this paper gives an introductory
overview of the kind of resources which are available as well as referring to a few specific items
as examples of interesting applications. Other papers presented at the meeting discussed the impact
of the Internet on museums in general and on museums in Africa in particular, and there were live
demonstrations throughout the conference. As lists of museum resources on the Internet already
exist, this paper provides links to some of them, without duplicating their content.
[Where I have found that links in this paper have become invalid since it was written I have
updated them when possible. I have not updated the content, however, and some of the resources and
projects referred to may no longer be current or not the best of those now available. - Leonard
Will, August 1998.]
The headings of this paper are:
-
The Internet throughout the world
-
Principal Internet services
-
Resources of use to museums
-
Collaborative projects
-
The Internet within a museum
There are many surveys of the size and growth rate of the linked network of computer networks which
we call the Internet; a collection of various sources giving statistical, geographical and other
information about the Internet is given in
Geography of
cyberspace and in the
Yahoo page for
Internet statistics and demographics
Any statistics are rapidly out of date, but one estimate by
Network Wizards is that in July 1996 there were over
12.8 million host sites and that the net
continues to double in size approximately every
12-15 months: this corresponds to a growth rate of 5 to 6% per month. There is no way of
telling how many users there are per site.
WWW pages from several hundred museums were listed on the
Virtual Library Museums Pages (VLMP) in mid-September 1996,
and the number was growing by at least one new museum site every day. The VLMP pages have been
visited almost three-quarters of a million times during the two years they have been available, and
they are now receiving over 1500 visitors per day. Many of these visitors will be museum
professionals, but the numbers will also include non-museum people looking for museums to which
they can pay virtual, and perhaps also real, physical, visits.
International connections to the Internet exist in 186 geo-political entities (presumably they are
called "entities" to avoid the difficulty of defining what is meant by a country) and there are 51
entities which do not yet have connections, according to
a survey published in June 1996 by Lawrence
H. Landweber and the Internet Society and available by FTP from the University of Wisconsin. Even
when there are some connections in a country, it may not be easy to obtain access, for reasons
which include:
- economics: organisations and individuals do not have enough money to buy the
necessary equipment, or to pay for connections; there may be a government or commercial monopoly in
providing services which keeps prices high
- political or religious restrictions: authorities may not tolerate the freedom
of thought and expression, and the freedom to communicate ideas worldwide which the Internet offers
- technical limitations: there may not be an efficient network of
telecommunications lines and electrical power supplies throughout the country; it may not be
practicable to install land-lines over difficult country and to isolated settlements
- lack of knowledge: there may not be enough people with the training and skills
needed to set up and maintain Internet services.
The Internet itself is a significant force in helping to overcome all these problems. It creates
social and commercial pressures for change, and spreads technical knowledge which helps people to
overcome difficulties. The Internet still retains much of its original culture of colleagues
working together to help each other, and although there are more commercial organisations on the
Internet now they still provide a great deal of information without charge. The quantity of
information, and the range of topics covered, are increasing daily. Most of what I know about the
Internet I learned from the Internet itself.
Within each country, connections are provided by organisations called Internet Service Providers,
who provide centralised switching equipment connected to international lines and other networks.
These Service Providers include academic or government networks, commercial services and
non-governmental organisations; those available in Nairobi include the
African Regional Centre for Computing,
Form-Net Africa and
Africa Online. The
Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) contains a database about
international networking developments and a large list of connectivity providers, with its major
emphasis on countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, and Latin America. The NSRC also
provides help with obtaining software and setting up network services.
There is a logical inconsistency in saying that you can obtain the information you need to set
up a network connection from the Internet itself, but there are many books and periodicals which
give enough basic information for you to get started. It is still probably best, though, to start
by speaking to someone who already has a connection, and to check the particular features provided
by Internet Service Providers in your locality, because service providers are by no means all the
same and the software and hardware you need might depend on which you choose.
Many different types of software, with clever and curious names, have been used or proposed for
use on the Internet as it has developed over the past few years. We have ActiveX, Archie, Java,
Jughead, Gopher, Hyper-G, Telnet, Veronica, WAIS, the World Wide Web and Xanadu. Some of these
systems are obsolescent, some are still in the development stage and some are the current
mainstream systems.
From a user's point of view, though, it is best to think of the Intenet as providing three main
services like those we find on the main street of any town: "the Post Office", "the newsagent" and
"the library". In future the Internet will fill some of the roles of "the department store"
(electronic commerce), "the cinema" (video on demand) and "the museum" (virtual reality), but these
applications are still somewhat experimental and I shall not discuss them in detail.
Electronic mail, or "e-mail", is one of the earliest and simplest applications, but it is still
perhaps the most used. It does not need an advanced computer or a fast modem, but it allows people
to work together regardless of the bounds of distance and time. It combines some of the best
features of the telephone and the fax machine with the ability to send messages in machine-readable
form which can be edited and printed by the recipient. Many of the arrangements for this CIDOC
conference were made by email, and it would have been a lot more cumbersome and expensive to do it
in any other way.
An important additional feature of email is the ability to send attachments to mail messages.
These can be any kind of computer data, including formatted word-processor documents, images or
programs. Modern e-mail programs using features such as
MIME (Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions) deal with the processes of converting these binary files into
printable characters for transmission over email links and converting them back to binary form
again on the receiving machine, without the users having to bother about how it is done.
There are directories and lists such as the Infospace
"White pages" service, the "Internet Address Finder" or
"WhoWhere" which can be used to find email addresses
for people and institutions. For museum professionals there is the
MDA UK Museums e-mail Directory and the
International
email directory for museums maintained by Lawrie Conole from Australia but mounted on a Museum
Computer Network site in the United States. This list is rather out-of-date at the time of writing.
As well as personal mail, the post office also brings us circulars and junk mail of various kinds
from mailing lists, and these too have their electronic equivalents. At least with electronic mail
it is easy to delete items we don't want, especially if they are given meaningful subject headings
(it's generally safe to delete anything with a heading in capital letters followed by a row of
exclamation marks). Some mailing lists are very useful, though, and I shall discuss these in the
next section.
Newsgroups and mailing lists are very similar in the way you use them; they are both like the
letters columns of specialist newsletters, with an active and public exchange of views between
people interested in a topic. The difference is in the way they are delivered: newsgroup items are
distributed and stored on service providers' machines; anyone can read them there or transfer them
to their own computer. Mailing lists hold central lists of names and e-mail addresses of people who
want to receive them, and their messages are sent by private e-mail to each member of the list.
Each of these types of distribution mechanism may be moderated; in this case contributed
messages are scanned by someone to check that the content is appropriate for the list before it is
distributed to all the subscribers.
There are over 17,000 newsgroups and thousands of mailing lists currently available. A useful
selective list is Diane K. Kovacs' Directory of Scholarly and
Professional E-Conferences. Other directories of mailing lists include the
Liszt searchable list of 63,200 lists from 2017 sites (numbers
as at 29th October 1996), and those maintained by Tile.Net or
CataList; these latter two are limited to
lists which use L-Soft International's
Listserv software package, but this includes many
of the useful ones (9430 lists at 31 October 1996). Information about lists dealing with museum
topics are given on the ICOM site and on a site
maintained by the Overall Knowledge Company
in New York.
Like personal mail, circulars and newsletters are delivered to our homes and desktops once we have
decided to subscribe, without our having to collect each item as it becomes available. A great deal
of information on the Internet, though, requires us to take action to fetch it ourselves, making an
electronic visit to where it is held in the same way as we might make a physical visit to a library
or bookshop. The software which is used for this is now predominantly a World Wide Web browser, the
two leading versions being
Netscape and
Microsoft Internet Explorer. Various other software
packages are available, some of them supplied by Internet service providers who may require the use
of their proprietory software to connect to their services.
Although the trend is very much towards graphical interfaces with lots of pictures and
diagrams, this is not necessarily an advantage. The amount of data required to represent an image
is much greater than the equivalent area of text, and images therefore take longer to download and
occupy more disc space. Many of the images now used in WWW pages do not add to the intellectual
content, but are just logos or fancy type styles of something which could be more efficiently be
presented in words. It is possible to configure a browser interface to receive only the text and
not the images, but unfortunately some pages use images for menus without a textual alternative.
There are many documents available on the WWW giving guidelines on good style, such as that from
Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the WWW Consortium,
the Sun Guide to Web Style or the
Web Style Manual by Patrick J.
Lynch at the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media.
For people who do not have, or prefer not to use, a graphical interface, there are pure text
mode browsers available, such as Lynx, obtainable free of
charge by FTP in versions for Unix and for
MS-DOS.
While some of the extensions which are being used with the WWW are just gimmicks which take time
and space (and often cost users money as a result), other developments are potentially of great
value in a museum context -- being able to show images of objects, for example. Animated graphics
may be helpful in explanatory diagrams, and developments such as
Java and
ActiveX allow small programs, or "applets",
to be downloaded to a user's computer along with a Web page. These can provide some local
interactive functions such as selecting from data or presenting different views or formats without
having to communicate with the remote computer for each command. Many examples are accessible from
the Gamelan
site. One project which illustrates what can be done is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's
Visible Human Project,
which allows you to choose and examine cross-sectional slices through a human body in three planes.
Another is the Virtual Stonehenge, which presents images of the monument which you can move in, over and around; you can also change the date represented to one of several points between 8500 B.C. and 2000 A.D. This was produced by a collaboration between Intel,
English Heritage and
Superscape Virtual Reality, and requires the downloading
of Superscape software. [The Virtual Stonehenge software page has been removed from the Internet site. The above link leads only to a descripton of it. - March 2000]
A good example of a museum site which uses Java to provide interaction is
the Cheekwood Museum of Art, which allows
the exploration of some of its paintings, bringing up commentaries on interesting details as they
are found and pointed to.
The fact that to use these facilities we have to download programs should make us wary. It is
always good practice to have a system backup before running a new program, and when you receive
Java or ActiveX applications you may not even be aware that you are doing so. Although they include
measures to safeguard users from faulty or malicious programs, no software should be trusted as
infallible. Various systems of encoded signatures and certificates are being developed to identify
sources which can be "trusted", but these are not yet widely enough understood and used for them to
be particularly helpful. Other security aspects relate to maintaining confidentiality and to the
safe transfer of money on the Internet, but these are outside the scope of this paper.
It is important to use the Internet efficiently, both so that you do not clog up lines with
unnecessary or repetitive traffic, and so that you keep your telephone costs down when using a
dial-up connection where you have to pay per minute. One of the most helpful ways of doing this is
by using "caches" or "proxy servers". These are places to which you can have rapid access and where
web pages can be stored so that you don't have to fetch them from distant sites when you want to
see them again. Caches may serve a whole country, a particular group of users (such as the
customers of one Internet Service Provider), an institution such as a museum, or a single user. One
useful caching program which you can run on your own machine is
NearSite; this will not only capture pages as you
view them, so that you can browse them off-line later, but it also maintains a file of bookmarks,
lets you search through pages you have captured, and lets you pre-specify pages or sites you want
it to fetch automatically the next time you connect.
Some of the information stored on the Internet is not in the form of World Wide Web pages. There
are documents in plain text, in various word processor formats, and in document exchange formats
such as Adobe Acrobat or
Envoy [Envoy is no longer being developed or
marketed, though the viewer software is still available - August 1998]. There is also a great
quantity of software which you can download to your computer in binary form. These resources are
normally transferred using "File Transfer Protocol" (FTP), which is a way of moving data from one
computer to another even though it is not limited to printable characters. Modern WWW browsers
incorporate FTP facilities, so that when you need them to do so they display a separate window to
manage the file transfer process. There are also separate FPT programs and such as
WS_FTP which give more control of the transfer process and
may be needed if you want to upload files to a remote site, as when storing your own WWW pages on a
server run by someone else. The traditional program for finding the location of files in FTP sites,
when you know the file name, is Archie, but Web-based systems such as
FTP search and its simple front-end
Filez, are now available and are easier to use.
If you have only an electronic mail connection to the Internet rather than a WWW browser, you can
still obtain much of the information on the Web. A useful document describing services which will
retrieve information for you and send it to you by email is available from various sources,
including the
news.answers
pages at MIT or the
Mailbase site in the UK.
Resources of interest to museums fall into three categories:
- Presentations by museums of their collections and services
- Resources and services for use by museum professionals
- All the other information on the Internet, which has no specific museum connection but which is
of value to museum people in doing their work
There are lists and guides to all of these kinds of resource already on the Internet, so I shall
indicate here only the kinds of information which is available without duplicating the
lists. Lists which give details and links include:
- The WWW Virtual Library Museums Page, edited by
Jonathan Bowen, is located at the central ICOM site in Sweden and mirrored at various other sites throughout the world
- The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN)
- Meg Ropp's examples of favourite
museum web sites, including some suggested by contributors to the MUSEUM-L mailing list
- The Museum Online Resource Review, prepared by the
Overall Knowledge Company, Inc.
- The Museum Professional page was
designed as a navigation tool for museum professionals and anyone interested in museums. It was
created by Harold Robinson at the John F. Kennedy University Department of Museum Studies in
Orinda,California, as part of a master's project on museums and the Internet.
- World Wide Arts Resources claims to offer searches through more
than 150,000 pages, including art galleries and art museums.
- MuseumNet is a commercial site, listing UK
museums and providing discussion space for museum staff, launched in October 1996 by NetSquared
Internet Solutions. It invites providers of services to museums to buy Web space for inclusion in
its lists.
- Internet Resources for Heritage Conservation,
Historical Preservation and Archaeology was originally developed on behalf of
ICOMOS, the Interrnational Council on Monuments and Sites, but
lists many items of interest to museums.
Museums use many different styles in presenting their collections in their Web pages, as they do
with printed publications. Some have aimed for coverage, including a high proportion of their
collections even though most items may not be given more than a brief textual description. Examples
of these are the Hampshire County Council Museums
Service and the Edinburgh University Collection of
Historic Musical Instruments. Others give a more "glossy" presentation of a selection of their
collections, of special exhibitions, or of "highlights" complete with pictures and interpretative
text, as is done for example by the Detroit Institute of Arts and
the British Museum.
Some museums provide searching facilities so that you can retrieve records of items by subject,
name, place or date, while others classify their material into groups to help you to focus your
browsing. Both approaches are desirable, and some provide both, though a good searching system
gives you the flexibility of creating your own groups as you search. Some go even further and allow
you to make a "virtual visit" to the museum. This may take the form of a real or imaginary map
showing parts of the museum you can visit, or may contain real or computer-generated pictures of
the museum building. Good examples are the National Museum of
American Art and the Finnish National Gallery
The Berkeley Museum Informatics Project has gone
even further than this, and in their "Mechanical gaze" project they experimented with a system which allows you to control an on-line camera in a gallery, so that you can move around a group of selected objects and choose your own viewpoint of each of them. They are also trying out a system of cameras and microphones mounted on free-flying miniature airships or "blimps" which
can be piloted remotely over the Internet. [The web pages giving access to these proejcts are no longer available - March 2000]. This is perhaps as near as we can come to the concept of
a virtual museum visit, until someone develops a working Star Trek type of matter
transporter to let us send real objects along telephone wires.
Other forms of interaction can be provided without needing to create physical movements in the
host museum (apart from the read/write heads of its computer's disk drives). It is possible to have
interactive exhibits such as those provided in science centres: the
Association of Science-Technology Centers has a
tour guide to these.
There is no clear boundary between museums, art galleries, archives and libraries, and all
these types of institution are now accessible on the Internet. The archivists are using SGML to
develop finding lists for their collections, as well as having added to the bibliographical MARC
formats to meet their needs. These systems make many options possible for searching and formatting.
The Encoded Archive Description project at
the University of Berkeley is one of the leading developers in this area. The library community has
long provided remote access to computerised catalogues, and many of these are now being converted
to provide WWW interfaces. Library and archive work can be traced through the library and archive
pages of the WWW Virtual Library, as well as through service such as the
Bulletin Board for Libraries (BUBL) or the Web pages associated
with the Archives and Archivists e-mail list.
These include documents and papers, standards, reference works, data models, directories,
terminology lists and thesauri, commercial information about the features and availability of
products and services, and support and upgrades for software and publications. Lists of these can
be found on the pages of CIDOC itself, the
Museum Documentation Association, the
Getty Information Institute
Berkeley Museum Informatics Project and the
Museum Computer Network.
There are many services which claim to index the whole Internet, or large portions of it;
well-known ones are AltaVista,
Infoseek, Excite and
DejaNews. These work in different ways and have different
strengths. Lists of these search services, with comparisons and evaluations, are given at
the Webmaster's guide to search engines, a
Robot-Driven
Search Engine Evaluation Overview by Gillian Westera, and a
Benchmark [test of] Five Search Robots by Dr Martijn Hoogeveen.
Starting points for lists of resources arranged by subject are the
WWW Virtual Library,
Yahoo and the
Clearinghouse for
Subject-oriented Internet Resource Guides
The great majority of the information on the Internet is in English, but there is a significant
amount in French and other languages using the latin alphabet. The
CIMEC, the Information Centre for Culture and Heritage, in
Bucharest, Romania, for example, has provided information about Romanian museums in Romanian as
well as English; the special characters required can be viewed using standard browser software, so
long as it is switched to an appropriate character set. As the use of the Internet spreads
throughout the world, efforts are being made to overcome the problems of representing other
languages, especially when they use character sets different from plain US ASCII. The development
of the ISO 8859 series of character set standards,
MIME and
Unicode are aspects of this work. A review is given in
Non-western Character sets, Languages, and Writing Systems
There are several projects in which museum organisations are working together to develop
standards and techniques and to make their resources more widely and easily available. Some of
these projects are listed below, with descriptive information extracted or summarised from their
publications and Web pages.
AQUARELLE is a research and development project coordinated by
ERCIM (the European Reseach Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics and supported by the European Commission,
(Telematics Applications Programme,
Information Engineering Sector,
1996-98 Contracts,
Project IE 2005.) Participants are
twenty-four cultural organisations, publishers, information technology companies and research
organisations from several countries of the European Union. It aims to allow museum curators, urban
planners, commercial publishers and researchers to collect information they need from wherever it
is located. It will give them facilities to store collections of information in "folders", which
will be available for searching and browsing on a network of connected servers. It will be possible
to issue queries to the system without knowing in advance which of the participants has the
required answers. It will explore multi-lingual information retrieval and will combine specific
search facilities with broader "browsing" approaches.
The CIMI Consortium consists of 16 organizations who have agreed to work cooperatively to solve
complex problems relating to the electronic interchange of museum information. CIMI's major focus
of effort is project
CHIO, a
demonstration project on the theme of folkart. It demonstrates online access to cultural heritage
information held in multiple databases independent of the hardware and software used to store the
data or search for it, showing the benefits of using two international standards cited in the
CIMI Standards Framework:
SGML and Z39.50.
This is part of the international G7 program "Multimedia Access to World Cultural Heritage". The
summary of its aims reads as follows:
"The project will realize easy infrastructures to access the cultural heritage documents by
multimedia technologies summarized in virtual directories containing information, on nested levels
of search, on fine arts in museums and archaeological sites. Aimed to both scientific and
educational purposes, with particular reference to conservation, restoration, and technologies for
easy and non-time-consuming operations for cataloguing material, is particularly devoted to
problems related to disabled people and multilingual users."
This project began with a meeting, held in February 1995 in Santa Monica, California, of
representatives from projects and institutions building electronic databases of resources in the
arts and humanities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. "Participants identified
the mission of the project as follows:
- To define means of ongoing collaboration to improve access to information resources in the arts
and humanities.
- To define mechanisms for collecting information about and sharing knowledge of information
resources in the arts and humanities.
- To develop mechanisms for fostering cooperative approaches to common technical and conceptual
problems."
It was agreed that as a start the participants would write Issue Papers describing the present and
future content, scope, access methods, and problems of their databases so that a clear picture of
their purpose and scope would emerge, leading to consideration of the scope and limitations of the
knowledge base they collectively represent. The Issue Papers would then be synthesized to determine
the issues and problems associated with working toward a more integrated, coordinated presentation
of these databases as part of a decentralized but comprehensive knowledge base for the arts and
humanities. The goal for completion and synthesis of the Issue Papers, and their mounting on the
participants' web sites, was November 1995. Some papers are now available on
the NISAH project site but the synthesis
does not appear to be available yet.
The RAMA Project (Remote Access to Museum Archives) is one of the major initiatives in Europe
sponsored by the Commission of the European Union under the RACE Programme (Research on Advanced
Communications for Europe). Its main goal was to offer validated services to users through telecom
networks on the basis of the Distributed Multimedia Databases belonging to the museums, and with
"just a single manual for all museums in Europe", regardless of the database contents
infrastructure among other issues. The main challenge was to face the real problem of
interconnecting heterogeneous environments, such as museums of different nature (different object
registration cards for Archaeology, Fine Arts, etc), different museum archives operating over
Database Management Systems (DBMSs) of different vendors and with different and pre-orchestrated
internal data structure (even in the case of common vendors), and different LANs operating under
Software of different vendors, in order to offer the information retrieved through a common
client/server application via Internet. The project has been user driven in such a way that the
users validate all the stages of the project, thus ensuring the final acceptance of the products.
The RAMA services for museums (Information Provider Sites) are supported by an open, scalable,
and interoperable multimedia system architecture, implemented on the bases of a low cost equipment
set (clients being Window PCs). Servers operate under UNIX, to ensure openness and
interoperability. Full compatibility among different databases is ensured by the generation of a
Common Query Mechanism, which is translated into the site Query Language by a suitable formatter/parser.
The RAMA services are currently installed as preoperational via Internet at the RAMA
participant museums an pilot user sites, as well as at about 20 museums elsewhere in Europe and the
US. Currently, the RAMA Consortium is founding the IMIN (International Museums Information Network)
as well as an exploitation company called Museums On-Line with US and European shareholders to deal
with support, software maintenance, new services and product development, and museums network
management. IMIN and Museums On-Line are two complementary bodies that, with the support of Public
Network Operators (PNOs) in Europe and the Commission of the European Union, widely spread the RAMA
results with a clear purpose of the exploitation of multimedia services for museums throughout the world.
[Information on RAMA extracted from abstract of: Telemuseum services via Internet: present and
future / by Guillermo Cisneros, Jesus Bescos and Jose M. Martinez. Information Services &
Use, vol.16, no.02, 1996, ISSN: 0167-5265, p.81-101.]
In deciding their policy for Internet activities, museums should consider them in the context of
their overall information systems strategy. This should not only cover the preparation of material
targeted at fellow professionals, the general public, children, and special interest groups, but
should also consider how Internet facilities can be provided and used within the museum itself.
Aspects which need to be discussed include:
- What access to the Internet should be provided to museum staff? Do some categories of staff
need it more than others?
- Should there be restrictions on how staff use it, and if so how should these be implemented?
- Where are the boundaries between retrieval of essential professional information, current
awareness and problem solving, professional communication, education, continuous professional
development, browsing for interest, and entertainment?
- What use can be made of Internet technology for internal communication within the museum? The
"Intranet" concept is to use Internet protocols to provide private mail, news and WWW services to a
closed user group such as the staff of a museum or group of museums.
- How far can the Internet be integrated with other information services within the museum?
- Can an interface be provided to the collections documentation system, to the library catalogue,
the archives listings, and the museum's files and records?
- How should the use of these services be costed and paid for?
- How should priorities be set and demand regulated?
- How will copyright in text, images and software be dealt with, both in the use of copyright
materials obtained from elsewhere and in the use by others of the museum's own copyright materials?
- What security measures will be required to maintain the integrity of the museum's data and to
safeguard confidential materials?
All these points are regularly debated on the Internet and there are many papers describing how
other insitutions have dealt with them.
The Internet can make a major contribution to the public image and face of the museum, and can make
its collections and resources known and used by a world-wide audience in a way which was never
previously possible. It is important that all museum staff should be aware of this, should be
encouraged to make their contributions and to take advantage of the benefits which the Internet brings.
Input will be required from staff with functions in documentation, education, interpretation,
library and information services, computing, design, public relations, marketing and publications
as well as those in curatorial departments. They should be see the Internet as another tool which
will enhance, but not replace, their traditional activities. It is important that appropriate work
on the Internet should be recognised as valid professional activity, and that, for example,
electronic publications should be taken into account in assessements as well as those published in
printed journals.
There may be opportunities for museums to develop new services based on their Internet
presence, such as remote enquiry-answering services, news services on the subjects they cover,
on-line booking for events and party visits, distribution of publications and images (free or for a
charge), on-line shopping services and opportunities for advertising and sponsorship. It is for
each museum to assess the possibilites and decide which will make a contribution towards its
mission.
This document is at http://www.willpowerinfo.co.uk/musinet.htm
Last amended (but not fully updated) 2002-06-03
Comments and feedback on content or presentation are welcome and should be sent to
Leonard Will
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