There is most definitely a conservation argument for making materials available in electronic form. In addition to cutting down the handling of the original, and providing information to a wider audience, you can do things - like cut and paste for comparisons - that you could never do with the originals. ... Museums are the treasure houses of the nation and we are acutely aware that very little of it can be on public display. This [the World Wide Web] is a way of opening up some of the material that would not normally be known about to a wide audience.

Amazing but true - a museum which exists virtually before it exists physically.

Web users have access to the best selection of museum offerings, especially if they start from the pages at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, where John [sic!] Bowen maintains what seems to be the most comprehensive collection of museum addresses worldwide, including, for example, that for Norway's Northern Lights Planetarium.

Museums and the Internet, Jonathan Bowen