The Virtual Library of Museums

Introduction

People are used to having to visit museums. Museums provide information and there are a lot of people who are trying to gather information - schools, general public, tourists, etc. - all of whom are your customers. Of course they are used to having to come to your museum. Now, however, there is the possibility that you can actually present part of your museum directly to people in their homes. The following quotation is from an online article on the World Wide Web by Jason Argoski:

The new [online] users are looking for both information and amusement. And these, of course, are the very attributes that all good museums share.

The World Wide Web (WWW) Virtual Library is a globally distributed database of information. It allows you to choose information or directories in a wide range of subject areas, including museums around the world. `The world' is expanding online and so I have recently had to split up the directory into the UK, the USA and the rest of the world. At the moment that split between the USA and other countries is approximately equal, so perhaps the rest of the world can try and catch up with the US online. At least half the activity on the Internet is happening in the US at the moment.

Some Online Examples

The River and Rowing Museum (which is the museum that I have indirectly married!) was instrumental in sparking off my interest in online museums. It is a museum that does not actually exist yet, so it is perhaps the first museum that's been founded online virtually, before it actually exists in reality. As a result it has generating a lot of interest on Internet. Many rowers are online because traditionally universities have been networked, and a lot of rowers are at universities. This has been very useful for obtaining volunteers, offers of objects, etc. The Internet can reduce apparent distances since communication is very fast, but when people offer you boats from Philadelphia or wherever, then the non-virtual travel can become rather expensive in practice.

Another interesting example of something which could not have been done otherwise, is provided by the French Ministry of Culture, who have made a lot of online information available. Recently they discovered some new prehistoric cave paintings in France and, of course, it is impossible to open those to the public because they would be damaged. However, you can provide information about and photographs of the cave paintings online very quickly. These are available around the world to anyone who can access the Internet, with no risk of damage to the original objects.

The Netherlands Tourist Board have provide a complete list of all museums in the Netherlands. That is something I think we should do in Britain and any other country with significant Internet facilities. Unfortunately the British Tourist Authority has little or no online presence by comparison but I hope they will rectify this soon. Every museum should have at least a page saying when it opens, how to find them and how to contact them. The Canadian Heritage Information Network have produced done a very nice guide to Canadian museums. The Netherlands and Canada are perhaps the two leading countries at the moment proving the best countrywide lists.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, comprising one of the largest set of museums, has a very large online presence. They completely reorganized their pages on 8th May, 1995. They have sponsorship from Silicon Graphics, a computer workstation company, so large and prestigious museums might want to take note of this - there are possibilities for sponsorship online.

An early example of a smaller online museum in the US is the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley. Apparently they have very few actual visitors it in practice - I have been told about 15 a day - but they receive hundreds of online visitors because somebody has taken the time to do some very nice online exhibits of material there.

One problem of course is the number of languages around the world, and one thing you can do easily is to present bilingual, multilingual pages online. I am sure people may have come across the problem of having to have huge exhibit labels with different languages. You do not actually need to do that on the Web, you can separate out your languages. This is very useful in a country like Canada for example, where both English and French are spoken.

Statistics

To give you an idea of phenomenal growth, since I started this last year, accesses initially doubled every three months and are now running at about thousand a day. Who is accessing it? Over half the accesses are from US sites. In April 1995 there were about 30,000 accesses to the main Virtual Library museums page. The UK accesses are at around a tenth of the traffic compared to those from the US, even though we are the next most active country, followed by Canada, France, Italy, Sweden, Japan, and so on. However accesses from other countries, many of which are considered rather more remote, demonstrate that the Internet is a worldwide network: there are accesses from Lithuania, Slovenia, Turkey, Bermuda, India, the Philippines, etc. Most countries have some sort of on-line presence. Africa is the one major continent (apart from Antarctica) that is still largely unconquered by the Internet.

The rate of access increases significantly during US working hours. 8 a.m. is a very good time to use the Web in the UK because the US is fast asleep then. The network tends to become sluggish during the afternoons here. Most museums might expect more visits during the weekends. At the moment the virtual visiting times are entirely reversed online because everyone is busy net surfing at work. Monday is slightly quieter than other working days - people is still returning to work after the weekend - but during the middle of the week, everyone is hard at work on the network visiting museums around the world!

Conclusion

http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums.html

http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums/talk/