Bringing Authentic Museum Experience to the Web

Despite its lack of 3-D reality presence, the Web has some particular capabilities which make it of great interest to the museum world. It is both a temporal and a spatial medium. It provides the opportunity to meld imagery, text and interactivity. And it provides for both individual as well as group (albeit distributed) experience. These attributes are similar to those offered by the museum experience and this is what makes the marriage between museums and the Web such an intriguing opportunity. It is no accident that two of the earliest World Wide Web applications were museum-like projects: the Library of Congress exhibition of Vatican Art and the University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology exhibit.