Exhibitions in the ether

No need to walk around endless kilometres of the world's museums they are there, virtually. Jonathan Bowen looks to the future. Traditionally, visitors to museums have had to travel to the museum itself to enjoy the facilities on offer. However, the Internet now offers a way for people to interact with museums from the comfort of their own workstation.

Museums are starting to make information, virtual multimedia exhibitions and even collection databases available online. Links to museums that provide such information are held as part of the Virtual Library, a distributed repository of knowledge initiated and coordinated by the original inventors of the World Wide Web.

The WWW Virtual Library museums page includes hyperlinks to forward-looking museums around the world, and virtual exhibits only available on the network. The countries represented include Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The possibilities are as yet largely untapped by the majority of museums. But new museums and exhibits are being added all the time. The Ontario Science Centre, Canadian Museum of Civilisation, Georges Pompidou Centre (Paris), San Francisco Exploratorium and Smithsonian Institution (Washington) are among the museums which have already made information and virtual exhibitions available online.

The first in the UK to establish a significant on-line presence are the Natural History Museum (London) and the newly formed River and Rowing Museum at Henley, which even before it opens to the public has been using the Internet to increase awareness of the museum and to make requests for information, objects and volunteers. If possible, museum sites should have particularly good Internet connections, to allow multimedia to be provided effectively. Moving pictures and continuous audio feeds stretch the current Internet technology to its limits. The introduction of Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks, optical fibre links and improved multicasting protocols will all alleviate the situation, helping to make remote multimedia indistinguishable from local access.

As well as providing educational virtual exhibitions and other museum information for the general public, museums could also make information on their collections available on-line. This aspect is the least well developed, but it could allow remote study and research by scholars, facilitating preparation before a visit or even saving the necessity of a visit, if detailed information and images of objects are available online.

The "information superhighway" is likely to have an increasingly significant effect on museums of national and international status, allowing resources to be made available remotely throughout the world. It is important that the available information is catalogued and organised in a convenient manner.

The WWW Virtual Library provides a suitable existing framework. Currently about one new museum link a day is added to the museum pages. This is likely to increase rapidly, and a suitable infrastructure will be necessary to allow convenient navigation to the museum of one's choice. It will be desirable for national representatives to organise the information for individual countries, groups of countries or continents. It would also be useful to be able to find online information for a given type of museum such as science museums or art museums. This will require coordination on an international scale, preferably based at a number of sites around the world.

Representatives from countries with a significant online museum presence could collaborate, allowing further development of the Virtual Library museum pages to proceed on a larger scale. It would be desirable for representatives from Canada, France, US and the UK to take part, since the majority of museum networking worldwide has been taking place in these countries.

Museum-related organisations such as the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), French Ministry of Culture, International Council on Museums (ICOM), Museum Computer Network and the UK Museum Documentation Association should be involved.

Representatives of other countries could join as museum networking increases to a point to make this worthwhile. I would welcome contact from these or any other organisations with an interest in online museum information.

An international initiative could provide the infrastructure necessary to maintain a worldwide network of museum information. The benefits of such an international resource for education, research and recreation would be considerable. Museum attendance is one of the most popular pastimes in many countries. This will provide another way for people to "visit" museums. Far from discouraging actual museum visits, it is likely to encourage these by providing a taste of what a museum has to offer, both for people who might not visit otherwise, and for people who might be planning a visit, with a school group for example.

There are around 35 million people with Internet access and the number is doubling each year. WWW usage has been estimated to be increasing at 1 per cent per day. The museums page is accessed around a thousand times a day and is easily the most popular page at our site, the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. The number of virtual museum "visits" is doubling every two to three months. The exponential growth shows no sign of abating.

Universities have enjoyed good computer network connections over the past decade or so. It is to be hoped that museums will enjoy a similar level of access over the coming decade to see them into the next millennium, not to mention museum customers such as schools and individuals in the home.

Jonathan Bowen is a senior research officer at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. His email address is Jonathan.Bowen@comlab.ox.ac.uk The Virtual Library museums page can be found at: http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums.html