Museum Building Children and teachers build museums together and offer them up to a world of visitors arriving through the portals of the World Wide Web. If a school is fortunate enough to be in a town which offers a traditional museum, the school partners with the museum so that both develop a presence on the Web.
Visitors arrive from China, Japan, Germany and Chile.
The vast archival resources of the traditional museum, most of which could never be displayed on the limited wall space of the physical building, can now be digitized and shared through the wonders of the multimedia computer. A local citizen walks in, sits down at a monitor and reviews a hundred photographs of the canning industry shot at the end of the previous century. At the same time, an electronic visitor from Iceland reviews the same photographs. The museum has an international presence. This chapter offers strategies for the creation of virtual museums in schools which will engage students in collection development as curators.