Museums and archives on the world wide web: Resource guides and the emerging state of the practice

The WWW is providing the public a rich array of, so far, free cultural heritage. The ability and willingness to provide multimedia representations of cultural institutions and cultural heritage artifacts is expanding at a dauntingly rapid rate. For example, the French Ministry of Culture (http:/Avww.culturefr/gvpda.htm) made a sampling of images of Paleolithic cave paintings from the VallonPont-d'Arc grotto available over the WWW within weeks of their discovery. In addition, the Getty Art History Information Program recently announced the creation ofaWWW site (http:/A~ww.ahip.getty.edu/ahip/home.html) designed to spur the "collaborative building of a cultural information infrastructure" by demonstrating "how massive bodies of cultural information from heterogeneous sources can be gathered, digitized, stored, processed, and distributed across national and international boundaries."