The website has recently shared joint first place in the professional division of the Museums and the Web 98 conference Best of the Web Competition with the Getty Information Institute. AMOL now plays a significant role in coordinating collection management activities across Australia. The advent of the World Wide Web and its associated metadata and interoperability requirements is presenting new challenges and potential rewards for collection managers all over the world. In contrast to the larger state, commonwealth and regional institutions, smaller regional and community museums and galleries have been slow to adopt computerised collection management. The benefits are not as obvious for the smaller institutions.
Internet access is available through most public libraries and schools.
The AMOL project has a responsibility to work in regional and remote Australia where smaller institutions that don't have the resources or desire to move to a more advanced form of collection management can be assisted with digitisation projects. For these small regional museums, galleries and heritage sites many of whom have no regular sources of funding, moving to computerised collection management is a large step that can seem very difficult to justify. Once the benefits of a simple computerised system have been demonstrated, many quickly move to embrace the opportunities the new technology offers. Through a regional grants program AMOL is able to provide hardware, software and training to a number of museums and galleries each year. These systems can be of great benefit to a small gallery or museum and allow many management functions to be centralised along with object documentation.