An International Conference For Museum Professionals Working On The Web

Citation

Hazan, S. (1999), "An International Conference For Museum Professionals Working On The Web", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916hac.002

An International Conference For Museum Professionals Working On The Web

Introduction

Museums and the Web 99 (MW99) http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/index.html, held from Thursday to Sunday, March 11-14, in New Orleans, Louisiana, was the third professional conference devoted to the impact of the Web on museums and museology. Museums and the Web 99 featured approximately 135 speakers from 25 countries around the world. It offered an opportunity to meet colleagues and peers from around the world who were perhaps previously familiar as online personae and who came to share their skills and experiences with the approximately 450 participants. Papers were presented highlighting the issues facing museums and their Web presence, and current controversies and issues were discussed in lively panel discussions.

The exhibit offered an opportunity to view available commercial products and services, to meet with the people behind the scenes, and to discover new museum applications of the Web. Vendors of software, consultants, and technology developers exhibited their products in the Exhibition Hall. On Friday evening and all day Saturday, attendees could catch up with the latest products and services available to help them build and maintain museum Web sites.

Thursday March 11

Full- and half-day workshops were offered by leaders in the museum computing field. These workshops ranged from the theoretical: "Developing Museum Information Policies", "Digital Interfaces for Art and Science Exploration for Special Populations", "Immersive Histories: Digital Storytelling and Computer Game Design", and "Musing on Meanings: Theory and Practice of Museum Web Site Development and Use"; to the more practical: "Web Publication Made Easy with SGML/XML", "Building Your Own Web Site", "QuickTime Virtual Reality in Cultural Heritage", "Images for the Web: Managing Digital Access", and "Web Site Information Architecture: Planning and Designing Information Collections on the Web". This range provided attendees with a focused way to build their skills.

After the workshops and before the conference got under way, attendees were invited to the Cabildo, one of eight sites in the French Quarter maintained by the Louisiana State Museum, for wine and cheese. The event was a perfect jumping off point for the conference and an opportunity to meet other attendees, find groups to join for dinner, and get together with old friends. After introductions by co-chairs David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, participants moved on to the first event.

Opening Event: In the Beginning God Was Dead

The Re-U-Man project was inaugurated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an interactive project. Its permanent home on the Web site invites commentaries in different forms. From time to time Re-U-Man appears as an installation project in museums, and galleries, and as an event in universities and conferences. Re-U-Man breaks down the barriers between the physical realm of the museum and the virtual realm of the Web site. At the New Orleans conference, performer Udi Aloni, from New York, presented the new phase of Re-U-Man: "In the Beginning God Was Dead" http://www.re-u-man.com.

Friday March 12

Opening Plenary

Co-Chairs: David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, Pittsburgh, USA

From the Mountains of the Moon to the Neon Paintbrush: Seeing and Technology

Peter Walsh, Director of Information and Institutional Relations, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Peter Walsh, quoting Marshall McLuhan, pointed out that new technologies not only changed those entities that were both directly and indirectly related to technology, but actually affected all human culture. "Identifying these changes, never an easy task, was, for McLuhan, the first step toward understanding them", he said. Walsh's Neon Paintbrush was a metaphor for the way we perceive visual culture delivered through the vehicle of the World Wide Web. In a bid to define "looking" and "seeing", he described Helen Keller's description of a boat journey around New York showing her ability to transmit visual information in spite of her not being able to see:

"The occupants can be seen going about their household tasks cooking, washing, sewing, gossiping from one barge to another, and there is a flood of smells which gives eyes to the mind. The children and dogs play on the tiny deck, and chase each other into the water, where they are perfectly at home (Keller, 1998, p. 506)."

He explained how "looking" was fundamentally different from "seeing", and how "seeing" consequently helps create visual culture. He used examples such as Galileo's reaching his astonishing conclusion after perceiving the cosmos through a telescope and the Copernican Revolution, which he defined as a paradigm shift. These landmarks outlined for Walsh the relationships among seeing, vision, thinking, and how ultimately technology is affected as new technological entities replace the previous ones.

Walsh, in further interpretations of "seeing" and perception, described how maps are biased in order to promote the map makers' points of view and went on to describe children's stories, Disney movies and Saturday morning cartoons as fertile grounds that provide what he called "the instant symbol".

Walsh concluded:

The advent of the World Wide Web coincided with the introduction of cheap, high-quality color computer monitors so that much of the Web appears as if painted with a neon paintbrush. Thus, the web is cozy, warm, and small. It is a flickering substitute for a nice wood fire and seems to draw the same rapt, uncritical attention.

He left us with these comments: "As you move through this conference, tread softly, but please keep your eyes open".

In response to Walsh's plenary paper, Dakin Hart, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, offered a rethinking of the beliefs and prejudices museums have that we might want to ditch in the digital age. He defined "Maxims for Museums" based on Esther Dyson's article in Wired in July 1995, and related them to Peter Walsh's "Neon Paintbrush".

Telling Stories: Making Data Sing and Dance

Chair, Thom Gilespie, Director of the MIME Program at Indiana University School of Library and Information Science, Bloomington, Indiana

Exploring Narrative: Telling Stories and Making Connections

Guy Herman, Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic Seaport, USA

Guy Herman discussed Web-based narratives and referred to Janet Horowitz Murray's book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Quoting examples from outside the realm of the museum, he invited us to think about how story-centric sites make appropriate use of the Web environment and urged participants to consider the incorporation of the narrative in order to enhance museum experiences online.

Once Upon a Time: Using New Narratives in Educational Web Sites

Bart Marable, Terra Incognita Media, Creative Director and Principal, Terra Incognita Interactive Media, Alexandria, Louisiana

http://www.terraincognita.com

Bart Marable described storytelling as one of civilization's oldest technologies for sharing ideas and showed how it continues to offer effective techniques for reaching audiences through the Web. Museums developing online content can leverage the power of storytelling to create educational experiences that are both more cohesive and more engaging to the user. Just as the cinema and the television developed their own unique approaches to storytelling, the Web offers new techniques for extending this most ancient of technologies. His paper examined several new narrative models which have been used to bring educational content to life on the Web.

Telling Stories: Procedural Authorship and Compelling Museum Databases

Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

According to Steve Dietz,

Today, as even a cursory scan of the 1999 Museums and the Web conference program ( http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/sessions/index.html) shows, there are countless remarkable efforts to yoke databased museum information to Web-based outreach programs. Are we there, then? Can users put their fingers on all the information they want? Are we telling stories that matter? Are we creating compelling, interactive experiences? The answer is yes, there are some provocative models, and, no, it will be impossible to implement them on a universal scale as they are currently constructed.

Dietz's paper looked at existing examples of artistic practice to speculate on how it might be possible to use databases to tell meaningful stories about the objects museums collect.

Enhanced Student Experiences

Chair: James Blackball, Senior Information Systems Analyst, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Creating an Interactive Student Medium for Learning about the Holocaust

David Klevan and Arnold Kramer, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

The first of three papers dealing with museum/school projects showcased the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and its recently launched interactive student resources for secondary school teachers and their students. In addition to presenting a variety of historic materials from the museum's collections, the Web site provides opportunities for students to share ideas and ask questions among themselves, with their teachers and with Museum staff. This pilot already has been tested at seven schools across the country and the team shared with us their experiences in setting up the Web site and their initial and promising results.

Building and Sustaining Learning Communities

Nancy Hechinger, the American Museum of Natural History, New York

Nancy Hechinger discussed the National Center, the education initiative of the Museum established in 1997 to advance science literacy for all Americans. The Center develops educational materials, programs, and activities that capture the scientific resources and spirit of the Museum, make science more accessible, and promote the teaching and learning of essential twenty-first-century skills. The project is directed at audiences of all ages and in all places (homes, schools, libraries, planetaria, science centers, colleges and universities, and community-based organizations), and takes advantage of the power of information and telecommunications technologies.

Linking and Thinking ­ The Museum @School

Susan Hazan, Curator of Multimedia Education Unit, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

http://www.imj.org.il/vrmenorah

http://www.galim.org.il

Susan Hazan's paper introduced an innovative Web-based project designed at The Ruth Youth Wing, the Education Department of the Israel Museum, based on the 3D virtual exhibition, "The Light of the Menorah". This site is a photo-realistic 3D gallery tour, streamed at 15 frames per second over standard dial-up modems with embedded 3D-hyperlinks enabling students to interact with the movie. Through online quests, interschool projects and competitions, and the direct and active involvement of students, teachers and families with curators and museum staff, the Israel Museum has brought the Museum to School via an interactive and dynamic Web site for students, teachers and families.

It is fairly simple to translate educational print and video material into the HTML environment. Hazan commented, however, that the real challenge for museum educators lies in their ability to create links between the school and the museum, between student and student, from school to school, and from the home to the school.

The lively discussion that followed the three museum/school presentations proved that many school online projects are being considered by other museums and participants were eager to learn from this experience.

Evaluation

Chair: Matthew Stiff, Terminology Projects Manager, Museum Documentation Association, Oxford, UK

A Survey of Characteristics and Patterns of Behavior in Visitors to a Museum Web Site

John C. Chadwick, Institute for Learning Innovation, Annapolis

http://www2.nmmnh-abq.mus.nm.us/researchresults/

John Chadwick presented his research project, which was a first attempt to answer questions being asked by museum professionals: Who is visiting a museum Web site? Why are people visiting a museum Web site? What do the online visitors do when they come to a museum Web site? His study suggests that people come to a museum Web site ready to learn and museums have an obligation not to squander the opportunity.

Directions for future research were discussed, including a closer look at the dynamics of groups visiting a museum Web site. This study was conducted from December 3, 1997 to February 8, 1998 at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Web site. A total of 348 respondents completed an online survey that was an adaptation of a previously used museum visitor study to determine why people choose to spend leisure time at a museum.

"Web Musing": Evaluating Museums on the Web from Learning Theory to Methodology

Lynne Teather and Kelly Wilhelm, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

This paper provided an update to ideas about the "real" experience of the museum communication and meaning system, its significance to museum "virtual" Web development, and the conceptual and methodological implications for evaluation of museums' Web work. Lynne Teather and Kelly Wilhelm attempted to weave together Web evaluation and museological evaluation from both theoretical and applied perspectives.

The particular frame of reference reflected the research and evaluation work conducted around the University of Toronto AMICO Testbed in 1998-99. A number of research methodologies had been developed in the project in order to investigate the use of the AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium) Library in both a university and an art gallery setting. From the basis of this work, the paper examined the evaluation and implications for use of an art museum-based digital image and information database delivered to the university environment through the Web.

Design Patterns for Museum Web Sites

Franca Garzotto and Angela Discenza, the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

The paper presented a design-oriented comparative analysis of a significant sample of museum Web sites. According to the authors, the most innovative aspect of their work is that they define design patterns (Gamma et al., 1995; Rossi et al., 1997) to represent design problems and design solutions, and compare the various sites in terms of the frequency and use of the various patterns. Among different categories of Web design patterns distinguished: structural, interaction, and layout patterns, and a design model was used, HDM (Hypermedia Design Model) (Garzotto et al., 1993), to formulate design patterns in a clear and unambiguous way. Finally, Franca Garzotto and Angela Discenza suggested how to inspect the sites in a systematic way, using a list of abstract tasks which describe precisely what to do on the various constituents of a site (Garzotto et al., 1998) in order to discover the occurrence of the different patterns.

Best of the Web for 1999

Friday's activities concluded with the judges announcing the "Best of the Web for 1999" http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/best/index.html

The winner of the Best Overall Site was the Walker Art Center http://www. walkerart.org/ Ecaterina Geber, from the Canadian Heritage Information Network, said about the prizewinner:

If one starts at the Home Page, beyond content, navigation interface, and implementation, he or she is experiencing an interactive statement conveying that this site is about creating a mentality of how to experience and perceive a virtual space. The collage of "Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole" hints at the fact that the space to be entered is an experience of bringing together scholars and creative performers who have already ­ in their own distinctive ways ­ taken a path that leads to multidisciplinary presence. Walker, in bringing them together, invites the visitor to participate in a dialog between different attitudes, and to integrate the more relevant insights into a new perspective. All the "Bit & Pieces" of the site have a special space for Introduction, Interviews and reactions.

Other prizewinning categories included:

Best Online Exhibition Site

Guggenheim Museum's Cyberatlas exhibition

http://www.guggenheim.org/virtual/index_fst.html

Best Museum Web Site Supporting Educational Use

ArtsConnectEd

http://www.artsconnected.org/

Best Museum Professionals Site

Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN): Reference Tools and Resources http://www.chin.gc.ca/Resources/e_resources.html

Best Museum Research Site

The National Museum of American Art

http://www.nmaa.si.edu/

Judges for the competition included Maria Economou, Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK; Norbert Kanter, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, Bonn, Germany; Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MNGreg Van Alstyne, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ecaterina Geber, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Canada; and Slavko Milekic, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

The exhibit hall, which opened after the "Best of the Web" awards ceremony, offered an opportunity to view the latest Web activities that vendors have to offer to museums.

Saturday, March 13

Attendees started the day by sharing their interests over continental breakfast. These informal discussion groups have been the hit of prior years ­ and were a hit again during MW99. The pace changed somewhat at the two panel discussions that followed, which were no less frantic, and just as varied.

After the Honeymoon: Managing Multiple-Institution Collaboration

Chair: Scott A. Sayre, Director of Interactive Media, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, USA

Robin Dowden, Integrated Information Resources + Web Site Manager, Walker Art Center, New Media Initiatives, Minneapolis, Minnesota

James Blackaby, Senior Information Systems Analyst, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, Art Museum Image Consortium, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Recent trends in funding opportunities and technological capabilities are encouraging more and more organizations to form multi-institutional collaborations. The growing capabilities and cost-effectiveness of using technology, primarily the Internet, to forge new multi-institutional collaborations are attractive, but carry with them many often unforeseen commitments and compromises. While these collaborations hold many advantages, they also provide many new types of challenges. The panel explored many of these issues and what can be done to develop the most effective collaboration with the least surprises.

ArtsConnectEd is a large-scale collaborative project between the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center that provides public Internet access to integrated collections and educational resources from both institutions. Over one year into the project, panelists shared their insights on the economic, technical, political and philosophical advantages and issues encountered in such a partnership. Panelists included project managers, an educational specialist and a contracted technical project consultant. The panel also demonstrated the resulting ArtsConnectEd project. AMICO (Art Museum Image Consortium) is addressing similar issues on a larger, national level while looking at the challenges and benefits at a local statewide level. Also discussed was how simultaneous participation in both projects can be mutually beneficial to both projects.

ArtsConnectEd

www.artsconnected.org

AMICO

www.amico.net

Shock of the View: Panel Discussion on Audiences, Artists and Museums in the Digital Age

Chair: Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Randall Packer, Director of Multimedia, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California

Carl DiSalvo, Bitstream Underground, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Peter Walsh, Director of Information and Institutional Relations, Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Sarah Schultz, Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis

From September 1998 to March 1999, the Walker Art Center, in conjunction with the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Rhizome, the San Jose Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts produced nine exhibitions. These exhibitions compared a museum object or activity with a virtual work, along with an accompanying online listserv.

The panel discussed the process of their collaborative effort and explored the results and their implications for museums' online programming. Strategies were compared for the presentation of real objects in virtual space with works designed for the Internet, the "museum without walls", and how effective the listserv discussion was, especially in comparison to other traditional museum practices such as lectures, guided tours and on-site "salons". "Shock of the View" http://www.walkerart.org/salons/shockoftheview/ evolved from "Beyond Interface", a similar online art/Web project devised the previous year, for the Museums and the Web Conference '98, in Toronto, Canada.

Sunday, March 14

Sunday was a day of demonstrations and mini-workshops, which offered many more opportunities for participants to showcase their latest projects. It was the perfect time to meet with attendees in order to learn and share.

Closing Plenary: Socializing Virtual Space

Chair: Susan Hazan, Curator of Multimedia Education Unit, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Introducing the participants and summing up the conference activities, Hazan outlined the numerous reasons why people visit museums:

1. 1.

   To experience the object. Visitors know that museums contain rare, valuable, and universal objects, which can somehow be imbibed by the visitors and taken home by them after the visit.

2. 2.

   For the intellectual experience. A means to extend their own personal knowledge or to add something to their own internal life experiences, or merely to exercise their imaginations.

3. 3.

   Visitors come to the museum with a personal narrative. The visitor already holds a radical point of view and seeks to strengthen this point of view, or compare his or her personal narration with those of other cultures or eras. Perhaps the visit becomes an opportunity to bond spiritually with the objects and to reflect on their meanings. Exhibitions often are really powerful experiences and serve to contribute to the visitors' personal narrations ­ or sometimes they can have the opposite effect and prove to the visitor how right he or she was in the first place.

4. 4.

   For the social experience. How many of us find the museum an ideal meeting place with friends from out of town, the perfect place to bring the kids on a rainy day or simply to meet a friend, a place to chat in the pleasant ambiance of an art museum!

Museum Web managers need to find ways to incorporate all of these aspects of the visit at the museum Web site and to address all of these human experiences. This session dealt with perhaps one of the friendlier aspects of a museum visit, the social aspect.

In the short life span of the Internet, a mere five years, we have already moved through several generations. Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, Art Museum Image Consortium, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, and co-chair of the conference, likened the Internet to a five-year old child ­ already walking yet still wondrous at what he perceives around him. The way this may be perceived is in the way that the museum Web presence has already evolved through several stages.

At first, we all had to plant our flags, stake out our territory, commit to a domain, an identity on the World Wide Web. This was mostly a page metaphor. We transformed our brochures and uploaded information onto the HTML page. In the best case scenario we actually produced an online catalog or catalogs.

What was evident at the conference over the last few days was the impressive evidence of the second generation of the museum presence on the Net, the archivable database. While this has proved to be an effective method of providing access to the depth and breadth of our collections online, it has also proved to be a labor-intensive activity, requiring us all to spend many long hours handcrafting pixels and endless tweaking of old databases into new. We are now witness to some remarkable accomplishments and the results were apparent in the numerous workshops, mini-workshops, presentations and demonstrations presented at the conference.

So what is now ahead for all of us as we enter the next generation? Perhaps the solutions lie with museum educators. Is it sufficient to reward museum Web visitors with a frighteningly long string of search results? Perhaps a more satisfying visit could be a more compelling entry into the museums' holdings, offering an opportunity to view the exhibitions in a meaningful way, through coherent interpretation in a contextual structure. This may well serve to remind visitors how exciting, stimulating and rewarding museums actually can be. But how are we to go about actually doing this? In this panel presentation, we were lucky to be able to take a peek at three very different approaches. They all have one trait in common: they all strive to make the virtual space accessible, navigable but, most important, meaningful. All have three different end-users in mind. The key to success in all of these approaches lies in their ability to transform the hybrid real and virtual space transparently into an environment that allows for human interaction, a space for discovery and an exciting opportunity for learning.

Keeping the Virtual Social

Larry Friedlander, Stanford Learning Lab, Stanford, California

Friedlander shared with us his experiences in transforming the Wallenberg Learning Center, both a concrete and virtual space, into a coherent environment which aims to facilitate a meaningful dialog and stimulating space for both on-site and remote learning in community building. He presented projects that are already taking place in this hybrid/real space and showed how students have synthesized theory and practice, dialog and exploration by integrating distant and on-site experience and by forming communities out of diverse and distributed participants through the Stanford Learning Lab portal.

Collaborative Digital Environments for Art Education/Exploration

Slavko Milekic, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

Milekic highlighted his fascinating projects, bringing art environments through novel hardware, digital solutions and intuitive interface to another population ­ our children. He outlined how, although art appreciation/exploration is essentially a private experience, it cannot exist outside of a social context. Digital environments offer great potential for the enhancement of collaborative aspects of both art creation and art exploration. However, the current notion of a digital environment is vague and most often associated with the traditional concepts of computer use. Thus the goal is twofold:

1. 1.

   to present an analysis of the characteristics of digital environments; and

2. 2.

   to suggest their potential uses in the building of collaborative pedagogical procedures for the digital medium.

Milekic's environments include appropriate interface solutions, not merely scaled down for small hands and large fonts, but custom-built portals that allow for an intuitive approach to facilitate creative art activities.

Cooperative Visits for Museum Web Sites

Thimoty Barbieri, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Paolo Loiudice, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Paolo Paolini, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Francesca Alonzo, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Giuliano Gaia, Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnica, Milano, Italy

This creative team presented their virtual world and invited panel participants to take on active roles in the environment: VRML-Talk, an online shared, (fictitious) museum site. This approach enabled participants to venture into the VRML world and to visit a quasi-museum space together online and in real time.

The team argued that visitors do not go by themselves to the "real" museum; rather they visit with friends (or with a guide), talk to each other or the guide, or listen to each other. Traditional visitors in the real museum point to exhibits and follow each other and therefore museum Web designers should seek an online solution that allows for these complex human interactions and a way to make the experience much more rewarding.

The prototype was presented using a special technique developed at the HOC laboratory of the Politecnico of Milan: VRML-Talk ­ an authoring technique that allows the development of custom 3D environments in which actions and situations can be shared throughout a computer-based network. VRML-Talk makes use of standard web-based Internet/Intranet technology. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is a graphical engine and a Java-based TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) communication layer. Each user can "see" the position of the other users, being represented by avatars.

The most rewarding experience for the conference participants seemed to be in their ability to look at a world "through the eyes" of another user and both active and passive participants found this novel experience fascinating.

In Conclusion

The plenary session provided an exciting peek into the next phase of the museum web experience and offered insights into ways we can make our Web sites into fascinating portals into museums and a truly social space in the virtual. As Jennifer Trant commented,

"Parallel programming in virtual space will not be easy or free, but the opportunity to engage millions of people from distant cultures will prove compelling. For the experiences we create to be as compelling as the opportunity they offer, we will need to socialize virtual space and give intelligence to virtual objects, so that our virtual visitors can engage with us, each other, and the alien materials that make up our rich collections."

Museum and the Web 1999 was organized by Archives & Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and co-chaired by David Bearman and Jennifer Trant. Members of the program committee included Jonathan Bowen, Lecturer, University of Reading, Department of Computer Science, Reading, UK and Maintainer of the Virtual Library Museum (a comprehensive directory of online museums and museum-related resources http://www.museums.reading.ac.uk/vlmp/); Ben Davis, Program Manager, Communications, Getty Information Institute, Santa Monica, California http://www.ahip.getty.edu/; Dakin Hart, Assistant to the Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco http://www.thinker.org/; Susan Hazan, Curator of Multimedia Education Unit, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel http://www.imj.org.il; Sarah Kenderdine, Information Architect and Creative Producer for Australian Museum On-line, Australian Museums On-line, Sydney, NSW, Australia http://amol.org.au; and Liddy Neville, Netizen, Royal College, Melbourne, Australia.

Susan Hazan is Curator of Multimedia Education Unit, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. shazan@netvision.net.il