Weaving the museum web: the Virtual Library museums pages

Abstract

Museums have been discovering the Internet over the past few years like many other information provision sectors. Rather uniquely, they span both educational and commercial sectors, with a concentration of the original object even in this virtual world. The author has set up and developed the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) since 1994, an online international distributed museum directory. This is part of the WWW Virtual Library and is also supported by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The directory is probably still the foremost such resource, but commercial pressures are building, and the resource must develop to ensure its long-term future. This paper explores the important developments so far, the current situation especially with regard to automatically collected virtual visitor statistics, and possible future directions for the VLmp directory and related resources.

Web‐based discussion groups at stake: the profile of museum professionals online

“…The remaining (7 percent) principally browsed with Netscape. Similar results were found from virtual visitors accessing the Virtual Library museum pages (Bowen, 2002). For operating system platforms, Windows NT was used by most (42 percent); this is probably due to the fact that many museum personnel work in a networked PC environment.…”

“…We provide here a full disclosure of an international survey hosted on the Museophile Web site through a bilingual online questionnaire (in English and French) available from August to December 2002; the Appendix gives full details of the questionnaire. The Museophile project started in September 2001 and aimed to encourage the provision of online facilities for the museum community, including disabled access via the Web and e‐commerce and a spinout company, Museophile Ltd. (www.museophile.com), was founded in January 2002 (Bowen, 2002). Museophile forums were used to undertake this survey as well as being an opportunity to experiment with a facility that aggregates a variety of newsfeeds, newsgroups and specialised mailing lists for museum professionals.…”

“…Participation was statistically relevant with 145 usable replies to the questionnaire (out of the 153 overall answers), considering that the average number of messages posted on a range of typical leading museum forums was 95 during September 2002 (Bernier and Bowen, 2002). The data were calculated proportionally to each question answered; this may not correspond to the total number of respondents, since some museum professionals did not give their opinion on every question.…”

Museum Websites of the First Wave: The rise of the virtual museum

“…The VLmp was part of the WWW Virtual Library and supported by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The directory was split by country, with individual maintainers for each country (Bowen 2002).…”

Communicating Museum Collections Information Online

“…The initial research defined the sample of museum websites to analyse using the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp) in its 2008 version, an early leading directory of online museums around the world. The website was initially created in 1994 by Jonathan Bowen (originally at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory) and titled Virtual Library of Museums (VLM) and was later supported by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) [46]. The directory was developed and organized in a distributed manner by country, with around twenty people and organisations in different countries maintaining various sections, such as the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) maintaining the section on Canada or the Museum Documentation Association (MDA) and later the Collections Trust maintaining the UK section.…”