Weaving the museum web: the Virtual Library museums pages

Museums have been discovering the Internet over the past few years like many other information provision sectors. Rather uniquely, they span both educational and commercial sectors, with a concentration of the original objects even in this virtual world. In 1994 the author developed the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an online international distributed museum directory. This is part of the WWW Virtual Library and is also supported by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The directory is probably still the foremost such resource in this area, but commercial pressures are building, and the resource must develop to ensure its long‐term future. This paper explores the important developments so far, the current situation especially with regard to automatically collected virtual visitor statistics, and possible future directions for the VLmp directory and related resources.