Anne Mannix, director of public relations at the Baltimore Museum of Art, agrees. The museum's site is being revamped to include an art glossary and bibliography, along with loads of information for teachers planning a trip with their students. So far there haven't been studies documenting a rise in museum visitors linked to Web site traffic, but both the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Smithsonian Institution's National Gallery of Art are planning such surveys. Able would like all of the 8,000 museums in the United States to put their entire collections on the Web as an educational resource for students. That way, surfers could access entire collections, rather than the 5 percent to 10 percent museums typically exhibit at any given time.
Museums are educational institutions.
Turning the Web into a complete visual archive of museums' collections is easier said than done, however. Take the Smithsonian Institution, for example. It has 45 separate Web pages for its museums and educational programs. The main site is crammed with information and pictures of everything from Kermit the Frog to Abraham Lincoln. Digitizing the entire collection and putting it online would take years, says Michael J. Tuttle, the Smithsonian's webmaster.