Douglas MacKenzie wrote: > > Several people have written about making museum catalogues available via > the Web. It's not terribly difficult to do this but the important question > is why anyone would want to? How many folk come into your physical museum > and ask if they can do, or someone can do for them, a search of the > catalogue? The real trick is to build your web component in such a way > that it answers the questions museum visitors pose, not what curators ask > other curators (which is a whole other project)
I'm sure it depends on the museum, but we get a lot of calls from non-curators about our photograph collection, portraits, and even some artifacts. We are planning to make our database available to the public (hopefully some time next year) and it will be available through the web. We're fortunate that our database system (Cuadra Associates) includes a web interface in their museum system package. All we have to do is get our database in a condition for the public. We are also scanning representative pieces of our collection which will also be accessable through the same tool. But even with that, I don't think it matters that 70% of your potential users are other curators. They are still members of your "public". Online publically accessable catalogs are a valuable tool for the museum world. Julie Beamer Database Manager Virginia Historical Society (804) 342-9646 email: [email protected] web: www.vahistorical.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
