Information Services & Use 15 (1995) 317-324 lOS Press 317 The World Wide Web Virtual Library of museums Jonathan P. Bowen Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX13QD, UK Email: lonathan.Bowen@comlab.ox.ac.uk Abstract. The World Wide Web (WWW) Virtual Library of museums is an interactive directory of on-line museums on the global Internet computer network of networks. Virtual 'visitors' can select a 'hyperlink' to a museum of their choice (categorised by country) and view on-line hypermedia information and exhibits provided by that museum. Since its inception in 1994, the page has received over 200,000 visits, with around a thousand a day recently, easily the most popular page at our site. The paper includes a brief introduction to this library, some of the museum sites linked to it, visitor statistics, and possible future directions. 1. Introduction The World Wide Web (WWW) has been described as the 'killer application' on the Internet, the global computer network of networks because it subsumes and adds to existing network services, and also makes access much easier. It consists of a number of 'server' computers providing information in the form of text, graphics, sound, etc., and a much larger number of 'client' computers (typically running a WWW program such as 'netscape' or 'mosaic' on a PC, Macintosh, etc.) which collect and format this information in a form suitable for human assimilation. The user is typically presented with a page of textual and graphical information with a number of highlighted phrases or graphical icons providing 'hyperlinks' to other resources. To navigate the system, the user simply points to one of these items and selects it, normally using a 'mouse'. This interface comes very naturally to most people, hence making it much more usable than previous navigation tools on the Internet. A major part of the power of the system comes from the fact that the hyperlinks may lead to a range of different resources which can come from a server anywhere in the world linked to the Internet. As well as standard WWW pages, the resource could be audio, video, an on-line news article, an electronic mail form, results of a database search, etc. 0167-5265/95/$6.00 © 1995-IOS Press. All rights reserved