ABSTRACT
A growing number of museum visitors, online and in-house, have information needs that require museum professionals to collaborate, sharing data about their collections to meet changing expectations about information organization and access. Researchers and scholars (including curators from other museums) desire the ability to search databases that cross multiple museum collections to answer research questions or plan future exhibits. Primary and secondary school teachers want to integrate museum information resources into their curricula and educational materials without necessarily needing to know which museums contain which collections. In general, museum visitors are more likely to be interested in finding the resources they need, and less likely to care where those resources reside, as long as the information they need can be found easily and with little effort.
