Interactivity comes of age: museums and the World Wide Web

Abstract

With the speed that characterizes the entire Internet phenomenon, the International Conference on Museums and the Web, which broke new ground when it was first held in 1997, has already become an annual event of major importance to the museum world. The co‐chairs of the 1999 Conference, themselves path‐breakers in this new medium, describe how participants viewed the transformations taking place. David Bearman, President of Archives & Museum Informatics, consults on information management for cultural heritage institutions worldwide. Since 1991, he has organized and chaired the biennial conferences of the International Cultural Heritage Information Meeting (ICHIM) and is the author of over 125 books and articles on museum and archives information management issues. Jennifer Trant is a partner in Archives & Museum Informatics and was also co‐chair of ICHIM99. She serves as executive director of the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), and editor‐in‐chief of Archives and Museum Informatics, the cultural heritage informatics quarterly from Kluwer Academic Publishers. She is on the programme committee of the Digital Libraries 1999 conference, and the board of the Media and Technology Committee of the American Association of Museums.