Introduction: The On-Line Museum Cybergenre
by Marilina Fontana

In the book A Museum for the Global Village the typical museum visitor is described as a middle-class individual with a university education in social sciences. This visitor profile reflects the perception that museums are considered places of higher art and more sophisticated taste. Within the museum community, there is profound fear expressed at the fact that museums are cropping up to satisfy the needs and interests of the mainstream. The upsurge of such museums poses a threat to serious visitors. For they feel that taking a “popular approach” to the content and exhibitions in museums, would lower the superior quality that tends to distinguish museums. (MacDonald and Alsford: 1989,137)

In her work, Stephanie Eva Koester explains that early museums’ function was to display important collections for the sake of studying them for their rarity and brilliance. Oftentimes, these collections belonged to members of the rich aristocracy who wanted to show off their treasures to academics and experts alike. (Koester: 1993, 5)

The word museum is defined as: “a building in which objects of historical or scientific interest are stored and exhibited.” (Liebeck and Pollard: 1994, 531) This is true of most, if not all museums we know of around the world like the Guggenheim, D’Orsay, the Louvre, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. There is a new kind of museum, however, that stems away from the typical definition of what a museum is and does. It is the cybergenre called “on-line museum” only to be found in cyberspace. There is the question of whether these on-line museums are museums at all or just a way in which the medium allows for ordinary people to share their hobbies with the rest of the Internet community. On-line museums on the net range from odd, eccentric displays like samples of dirt to well accredited institutions like the Louvre and Guggenheim. Whether academic, historical, accredited or hobby-based, all on-line museums serve the same purpose: to display collections that reflect an aspect of the world we live in.

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