Steve Dietz: The best museum Web sites attempt do two things: they allow the visitor unprecedented access to information she is interested in at a level she can chose herself and they also innovatively present expert and particular points of view. Most sites tend to do one or the other better. When both are present, however, the site is on the right path to the oft-promoted idea of community - which is just another way of saying engaged audience, without which it is very difficult for any institution to survive.

In Keith Smith's gem, Structure of the Visual Book, there is a section called "Getting acquainted with the book," that talks about turning the pages and other basics that we often take for granted when reading. The fun thing about the Web is that the conventions are not yet firmly established, which makes the initial clicking through a site all the more important. Is it clear? Does the design look good? Do the pages load quickly? Good sites must handle these issues adequately. Great sites add a twist, whether it is superior execution or innovation.

Between the nearly untainable ideal and the absolute necessities, I have a short list of important criteria:

Comprehensiveness
I'm seldom interested enough in a site to return if it does not have a lot of information - within a self-defined scope, but more than I can digest in a single visit.

In this arena, the new "Thinker" Web site (www.thinker.org/index.html) for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco stands out. With an image base of over 60,000 objects with a relatively simple search interface, I hope more and more museums will be as committed to sharing their resources. [Since this article was published, the National Gallery of Art Web site (www.nga.gov) has come on-line with a superb search function and comprehensive access to its collections database of over 90,000 records. It is interesting to compare the two sites' engines, with NGA's relying much more heavily of structured mark up and The Thinker relying on "amateur" cataloguers to make a lot of information available to the public in a relatively short time frame.]

Specificity and portability
Once there is "a lot" of information, how easily can you find exactly what you want? Do you have to navigate a seemingly endless set of choices - however well defined - to get "there," or does the site bring the information to you, so to speak?

Most museum "walk" you through their sites, although an increasing number are providing searchable access via WAIS-like index of the text on the site. As sites become richer and richer, however, and especially as they become increasingly interconnected, text indexing such as appears to underly the Thinker database will begin to resemble the thousands of hits one commonly gets from a search on Alta Vista. The real "heavyweight" work for museums on this issue, however, is primarily consortial and proof-of-concept. See the Cultural Heritage Information Online (CHIO) demonstrator (www.cimi.org/projects/chio.html) or the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (www.ahip.getty.edu/mesl/). The Getty Information Institute also has a related project, a.k.a. multi-databse project (www.ahip.getty.edu/index/aka.html), which very instructive.

Filtered, with a point of view
Content is easy enough to find. The best sites filter the information and add a point of view to fortify it.

Jim Angus's untiring work on The Guide to Museums and Cultural Resources under the auspices of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles (www.lam.mus.ca.us/webmuseums/) provides an invaluable service - which is different from the monthly "Ten Cool Sites" that the Exploratorium choses and provides a brief commentary as to why (www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/sciencesites.html).

The Whitney Museum does dedicate a valuable spot on its home page to "Art on the Web," which includes links to "Other Sites That We Like" (www.echonyc.com/~whitney/weblinks/main.html). [For a more recent and fuller list of contemporary art on the Web, see Directory of Web Sites in Contemporary Art on the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal (media.macm.qc.ca/homea.htm).

These are the beginnings of a filter, but without the reasoning behind the choices, it is more like Siskel & Ebert's thumbs up than Pauline Kael, by whose opinions, over time, you can callibrate whether or not you will like a movie, regardless of whether you agree with her.

Meets a need/desire
It's easy enough to get visitors to a site once, but to keep them coming back the site needs to consistently provide a service, whether it is the fact you were looking for, stimulating discussion, a series of fascinating tours, or any number of other "opportunities." The bottom line on this issue is the museum Web site as a place of programming, just as its real life counterpart is.

The California Museum of Photography at the University of California Riverside is always adding new artist projects and exhibition modules that make it worth checking out on a regular basis (www.cmp.ucr.edu/). The Exploratorium does a nice job of integrating it's programming with its Web site, so that on a recent visit it was fun to hear Seymour Papert's lecture, "Learn How to Bridge the Digital Generation Gap" (www.exploratorium.edu/papert/index.html). [More and more sites are adding internet "broadcasting" to their menu, perhaps most notably Franklin Furncace's series of performances specifically for the Net (www.franklinfurnace.org)]. The National Museum of American Art had among the most extensive ongoing "translations" of its real-life programming to its Web site, with nine exhibition-based sub sites (www.nmaa.si.edu).

Brand identity/coherence
How well does a site take advantage of an existing brand identity or create and deliver a coherent whole that builds one?

Hands down, in my opinion, the Museum of Modern Art is among the museum Web sites yet created most identifiable with its existing presence (www.moma.org). This is no mean feat. It will also be interesting to see which museums or other organizations create new "brands" - coherent experiences that can be relied on over time - that people turn to for their art or science or history online. It is not automatic, I think, that the museums with the strongest identities will become the best museum Web sites.

Interactivity
Email forms are ok, but how much is interactivity bred into the bones of a site?

This is much more common in the scienes. The Exploratorium (www.exploratorium.edu/), the Tech Museum of Innovation (www.thetech.org/techtalks/), and the Field Museum of Natural History (www.bvis.uic.edu/museum/Home.html), all do a good job of presenting difficult content in an interesting way that allows for some user interaction.

[A site like the Walker's ArtsNet Minnesota (www.walkerart.org/artsnetmn/ in conjunction with The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Weisman Art Museum, which has a dedicated coordinator, an active listserv, and the ability for teachers to place their own lesson plans on the Web site, are beginning to push interactivity into a more robust notion of community for museums.]

Surprise me
That's the joy of the Web, finding something new or different; that makes sense and is fun.

The first time I saw the Guggenheim's "Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline" (artnetweb.com/artnetweb/abstraction/index.html), I was a bit taken aback by the way it "forced" me through its initial entry, but I think it is an iportant site for museums to understand. Matthew Drutt's and Adrianne Wortzel's "creative intervention" with the basic materials of the art and attendant exhibition materials, gives, I think, a sense of the difference between the transliteration of a work from a foreign language and a translation. The other simple but nifty thing they did - and continue to utilize throughout the site - is a different background and/or presentation of each new page. I found myself so interested in how the next page would appear that I actually read all the text, somewhat to my surprise.

Both the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside and the Dia Center for the Arts (www.diacenter.org/) also captivated with their early pushing of artistic intervention/innovation despite the unforigiving nature of the HTML 1.0 spec at that time. And they continue to be innovative, interesting sites. [Other museum sites are adding artist interventions, including the Walker's Gallery 9, which commissioned Piotr Szyhalski's Ding an sich (www.walkerart.org/gallery9/).]

What I love about the Exploratorium is that its Web site is so much of a piece with its chaotic yet profoundly engaging physical plant. While their Web site may be among the least appetizing aesthetically, it is easy to navigate, it has fascinating material--not just the cow's eye dissection either (www.exploratorium.edu/learning_studio/cow_eye/index.html) - and has an ongoing energy and life that many if most museum Web sites do not yet express.

Except for my grand prize winner - at least in the arts realm - which although it is not a museum per se, is a museum collaborator, is intimately concerned with many of the same issues as museums, and is perhaps the best example of the kinds of things museum Web sites should aspire toward: artnetweb (artnetweb.com. Not that there aren't aspects to differ with, but Remo Campopiano, Robbin Murphy, G.H. Hovagimyan, and Adrianne Wortzel have created a site that is worth spending a lot of time in on an ongoing basis, whether it is the weekly broadcast of Art Dirt (pseudo.com/netcast/shows/adirt/index.html) or the excellent Readings - links to "text-based objects" - (artnetweb.com/views/viewsind.html) [now updated in a monthly newsletter] or the innovative programming like the Broolkyn Web Jam (artnetweb.com/organism/index.htm) or the aforementioned collaborations with the Guggenheim or the slide registry (artnetweb.com/slidereg/slidereg.html - needs a better search engine) or the experimental work with VRML (artnetweb.com/vrml/index.html) [which is now the focus of artnetweb's exemplary "online education center"] or . . . check it out for yourselves.