ABSTRACT
New information technologies have opened a world of new possibilities to museum visitors, bringing with them new ideas about the experiences museums offer and new expectations about the information resources museums provide. The prevalence of digital museum resources and the ease with which digital collections information systems can be made available online has encouraged the functional convergence of digital museums, libraries, and archives (Rayward, 1998). Unaware of the historical barriers to information access that have separated physical information repositories, visitors today expect equal and immediate access to information regardless of the type of organization involved. No longer content with limited access to information resources about museum collections, many now expect that museums will provide them with the information they need, when they need it, no matter where in the world that information might be located (Cameron, 2003).
