NB: THIS PAPER WAS PUBLISHED IN ARCHIVES AND MUSEUM INFORMATICS 13 (1999): 23-53
From Docent to Cyberdocent: Education and Guidance in the Virtual Museum

W. BOYD RAYWARD

School of Information, Library and Archive Studies, University of New South Wales, Sydney, N.S.W., Australia

MICHAEL B. TWIDALE

Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
 

Abstract. The paper explores the nature of docents’ work in museums. From this is derived the concept of the docent function to describe different aspects of that work, some of which may be performed by other people and also by objects such as maps and guidebooks. This analysis leads to the idea of the cyberdocent – an extension of the docent function to take advantage of new possibilities afforded by advanced technologies. The potential of the cyberdocent in both virtual and real museums is investigated. The authors claim that it is the provision of docent functions that make a physical museum more than merely a collection, and equally, it is by the provision of cyberdocent functionality that a virtual collection becomes a virtual museum.

Keywords: Docents, virtual museums, tours, collaborative technologies

Introduction

It is perhaps a truism in the museum world that museums have undergone profound changes of focus and orientation in the last few decades. More than ever before they must reach out to their publics and find ways to be responsive to community interests and needs. They themselves are understood to be implicated centrally in cultural regimes of dominance and power of which they are now required to be aware and which they may be obliged professionally to interpret and to challenge. They have to be entrepreneurial and business-like, alive to the realities of a kind of cultural marketplace in which they must compete for support with a range of other organisations and interest groups. It has been observed that in this new management regime, if they are art museums, they may even have to repudiate any interest in aesthetic value (Kimball, 1994). What museums collect and how they manage and mobilise their collections have been affected by the much changed world in which they must now function and in terms of which they must define relevance and success. They have to understand that nowadays their narratives are as provisional, contingent and subject to radical revision as their own existence is insecure and constantly negotiable. Several "new" museologies have emerged to help in the process of both refocussing and rejuvenating the contemporary museum (e.g., Wittin, 1970; Papadakis, 1991; Simpson, 1996; Weil, 1997; Boylan, 1990, 1992; Harrison, 1994; Berlo and Phillips,1995; Stam 1993; Hofmann, 1989; Moore, 1997; Pearce, 1990.1992; Duncan, 1995 (a), (b); MacDonald and Fyfe, 1996).

With their emphasis on bringing public and collections together in the expression of a complex, educational, cultural and recreational role, museums carry out a range of activities and produce a variety of resources whose purpose is to make visitors aware of what is available in the museum, to guide them physically through the collections in a number of ways, and to increase their understanding and enjoyment of these collections. Different media of communication and communication processes are involved in this panoply of activities which touch on different aspects of what is in effect a general informative and educational function. These activities raise issues of co-ordination, consistency of availability, and responsiveness to the needs and interests of individual museum visitors. We call this complex educational /informative function the museum’s "docent function".

It is almost a definition of the concept of the "Information Revolution" that the availability of advanced technologies creates new opportunities for enhancing many different kinds of human activity. There has been a strong awareness of and speculation about the potential of information technology for museums including aspects of the docent function (e.g. Mason,1995; Wemmer, Erixon, Stanford, and Gardner,1996; Falconer, 1996; Keene, 1996; Capucci, 1997; Bowen, 1997; Trant, 1997; Mart, 1999). The Mosaic Consortium’s "Survey on the State of the Art" with its summary and annexes takes a broad sweep across all sorts of related technological developments in or applicable to museums (MOSAIC Consortium, 1998). One should also note among the thoughtful essays in Jones-Garmil (1997a), those by Anderson (1997), Jones-Garmil herself (1997b), Besser (1997) and Zorich (1997), which represent a wideflung net in which a considerable record of museum digitisation and Web experience is distilled. While the number of museums that are establishing a presence in "cyberspace" has been growing very rapidly, what they have been doing in this connection has attracted criticism because of superficiality, the lack of long term aims and unrealistic "hype" (e.g., Sudbury 1997; Clutten 1996).

This paper is an attempt to overcome some of the limitations that have been noted in discussions of and experiments with information technology in museums. How might we begin to address in some systematic way both the general kinds of criticism mentioned above and the sometimes bewildered conviction that so many of us have of the extraordinary potential the new technology has for museums? As a way of bringing various strands together and of ordering our discussion, we choose to focus specifically on what we have called the docent function in the new electronic environment. Existing and emerging technologies can be and are being used to capture and extend this function. We believe that the exploration of these possibilities has ramifications across the entire museum in terms of what it is and what it might become.

We adopt the portmanteau term, "Cyberdocent", for these technologies and the functionalities that they incorporate - and to maintain a parallel with the term used in the real museum. For ease of discussion, we also somewhat anthropomorphise the term. We believe a ‘Cyberdocent’ could take many forms and we attempt to sketch out the range of these possible forms. In our view Cyberdocent functionality should embrace effectively the tasks that are carried out by the human docent and the related informative and instructional practices museums have developed in the physical environment. But in addition one would assume that the electronic environment would allow not only different forms of expression of those functions but the provision of a range of additional functionality as well.

Our discussion is guided by a number of general questions. How should we structure and mediate for both a museum’s public and its staff the relationship of the real museum to its virtual counterpart? What are the distinctive aspects of what is involved in the "docent function" in the real world and in the virtual world? How might the one be most usefully be related to the other? Are there informational and educational synergies that might emerge from the interaction of the digital and the physical in carrying out the "docent function" in the contemporary museum?
 
 

Related Work

There has been a great deal of somewhat fragmented research and development on aspects of what we will explore more systematically in this paper. Kellogg, Carroll and Richards (1991), for example, used scenarios of a museum visit to explore how virtual reality techniques could be used to augment the experience of viewing artefacts, in particular in supporting different kinds of informal learning by visitors. Hoopes (1997) surveys recent web-based developments across a broad spectrum of activities and processes in US archeological and anthropological museums while Roberts and Ryan (1997) describe the use of virtual reality in archaeological setting. An example of a recent attempt at augmented reality in museums was reported by Copps (1999), where shining a torch on part of an artefact results in user-tailored explanation about that part being projected in front of the visitor.There are also accounts of the adaptation and use of less exotic existing technologies, such as Personal Digital Assistants (Not and Zancanaro, 1998) and CD-ROMs to perform aspects of Cyberdocent functionality.

The use of personalisation and the layering of meaning which we discuss in this paper has also attracted some attention. Thomas and Mintz (1998) survey a number of recent approaches that employ varying multimedia technologies in different kinds of museums. They examine the potential for productive interactions between virtual representations and actual physical artefacts. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC employs a number of such technologies, including giving each visitor an ID card with details about a particular Holocaust victim which can be used to further explore people and places in the Learning Center (Halevy 1994). Mase et al. (1996) propose the use of techniques related to intelligent agents and virtual reality to augment artefact representations. Milosavljevic et al. (1998) explore the use of dynamic artefact labels to tailor descriptions to the individual visitor. Cheverst et al. (1999) describe the use of hand-held computers and wireless technology to support tourists visiting a city. Effectively this extends the idea of the Cyberdocent out of doors and provides a potential connection between several different museums. There are even attempts at "automating" the human docent by building robots to provide guided tours (Burgard et al. 1999).

We see all these activities as manifestations of different researchers attempting to explore technological approaches to aspects of the docent function. Our aim in this paper is by means of a close analysis of the docent function in the real museum and the Cyberdocent in both the real and the "virtual" museum to try to provide an overarching framework within which such projects might be positioned. We believe that this will help us in understanding the space of possibilities and will reveal gaps for future research and development. Our long term aim is to help ourselves and others to decide which particular instantiations of the Cyberdocent functionality might be most promising and what we should be studying in order to inform the systems designs that will be involved. This paper represents our attempt to identify what might be desirable, to "scope" possibilities.

Assumptions

Underlying this discussion are two fundamental assumptions. One is not surprising but the other places us at odds with important developmental trends in museum digitisation.

• First, we are concerned with museums broadly speaking and with the collections that they assemble in all of their splendid variety for research purposes and for the information, education and recreational enjoyment of their publics. We intend our discussion also to embrace collections held separately, for example, in laboratories and libraries, such as botanical or paleontological specimens, collections of archeological artefacts, and collections of rare and precious books and manuscripts.

• Second, we are concerned explicitly with the particularity of individual museums and the electronic representations that may be developed for them and their collections in order to capture and extend that particularity.

Clearly, in the digital era, some of the most difficult questions facing museums are how are they to maximise the use of their collections, to attract increased public support, and to fulfil more effectively their individual informative functions in research, education and leisure. One popular and important approach takes the digital library as its model with the idea of creating a single over-arching virtual museum or at least a definitive collection on a given topic comprising systematically networked digital data drawn from a variety of sources. This collaborative approach is compelling and has encouraged interest in the development of the standards and tools that will facilitate exchanges between museums in the creation of special multi-institutional digital collections. This approach is represented, for example, by the work of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI, 1999), the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM-CIDOC), the Museum Site Licensing Project, the Art Museum Information Consortium (AMICO), the efforts to create the Museum Digital Library Collection and such regional projects as the MOSAIC Consortium, supported by the European Community, the Aquarelle project of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), and the recently announced Colorado Digitization Project.
 
 

Our approach to the challenges and opportunities of digitisation is a different one. We are not concerned with the digital museum in its generalised form. Nor is our primary focus some form of general Cyberdocent – a kind of web crawler - representing a congeries of tools for navigating the complexities of networked collections of digitised data drawn from a number of separate museums. Our focus is to begin with an actual, individual, physical, real museum and to consider the implications of creating a virtual representation of its collections before considering how aspects of this representation might be augmented or extended in the network environment.

Thus, we begin by emphasizing not the limitations that the physicality of museums imposes on their use which the new technology may allow us to overcome, but the important functionality that is represented by this physicality and the value of capturing aspects of it in digital form. Once captured in this way we can effortlessly destabilise the established arrangements and ordering of items in a particular museum’s collections to explore different relationships and purposes - a kind of postmodernist’s paradise. In addition we can also take advantage of the approach to digitisation described above and augment a particular museum’s collection by creatively incorporating into it related digital materials held externally.

In considering how the docent function might be dealt with in the digital environment, we begin with Part 1 of this paper in the real museum. We explore:

• How the docent function is carried out in the everyday physical environment. Our aim is to reveal important features of activities and resources. These range from the provision of introductory general information services involving human, print and audio resources to much more sophisticated educational and informative services;
• What human docents bring to their work in terms of attitudes, values and beliefs as well as social and intellectual skills and educational background;
• The kinds of information that human docents need and must have;
• The nature and limitations of group tours as a primary focus of the human docent’s work;
• The circumstances that facilitate or limit and constrain the work of the human docent;

• The roles of the education officer in management and as an intermediary between the general public, docents and the curatorial staff.
• The ways in which the museum constitutes an information rich environment.

• What would characterise the Virtual Tour
• The nature of the informative commentary that now becomes possible
• New approaches to individual clients and groups
• Possible hybrid systems that combine new technology and traditional ways of working to overcome problems and to maximise the effectiveness of what is most valuable in the old and the new interaction between the docent and the Cyberdocent

The "Docent Function": Information, Guidance and Education

Museums are complex institutions whose fundamental purpose is to exemplify, preserve and disseminate meaning. They seek to structure, to extend, to refine, to dramatise, in some cases to re-evaluate and overturn what we have come to understand about aspects of the past, the natural world and the efforts of man. They carry out this complex function of constructing and exemplifying meaning by means of situating selected artefacts. Museums are about objects which are chosen, processed and arranged for display so that they can be incorporated into the narratives about history, nature, technology, culture, science and so on that museums in effect exist to tell (e.g., Pearce, 1990, 1992,1994; Preziosi, 1995; Simpson, 1996; Walsh, 1992; Duncan, 1995 (a) and(b). This process helps to create a connective web between objects, the quirky physicality of individual museums, as we wish to stress, being part of their message and value.

In order to make their points, to encourage receptivity to what they intend, to draw people into their particular stories about the world, museums as organisations try to regulate and shape the attitudes and behaviour of their clienteles. In a fundamental sense, visitors are told what to see and what they should know. Most museums direct the attention of visitors to, and create their active physical and cognitive participation in, what the individual museum has to "say" about the phenomena that are its concern in two basic ways. The first involves the selection, arrangement and labelling of artefacts. The second is by means of what we call the "docent function."

In the physical world this information function leads to the development of printed posters, newsletters, brochures, guides, catalogues and maps. Information or enquiry desks are set up at the entrance to the museum. A cadre of docents is hired and trained to offer regular tours in the collections and give commentary on them; curatorial staff give one-off talks on the floor of the museum or illustrated series of lectures in the museum theatre. Educational officers coordinate the publicity and the out-reach and educational activities of the museum. This set of products, processes and personnel is central to what we have called the docent function which we explore in this paper. Thus the docent function is wider than an itemisation of the activities of a docent. It involves activities performed by other people, and the support offered by physical objects (such as maps and guidebooks) that nevertheless have docent-like aspects in their interaction with visitors.

Collections Selection and Layout

Most museums do not put their entire collection on display. What is selected for display, how it is arranged, what is put next to what and the general layout of the rooms and galleries implicitly tells a story to the visitor about what is important, how items and collections are related, and how they should be viewed. The selection, labelling and physical arrangement of individual items and whole collections comprise one of the most important visible statements that the museum makes. In a sense this primary arrangement of material is implicitly the provision of both a master narrative and an invitation to embark on a "master" tour of the museum. Of course, in the end there is always something arbitrary about the physical dispositions the museum makes because of the demands made by the nature and extent of the space that is available and the fact that once located in one place, items placed next to each other are not simultaneously available for location in other arrangements. In the virtual world the constraints of space and physical arrangement can be relaxed so that we can begin to explore how to overcome the limitations of this arbitrariness and the decisions behind it.
 
 

The Entry Foyer

At the simplest level, most museums have brochures with maps and diagrams that orient the visitor to the physical disposition of their collections. Often these brochures are positioned, along with all sorts of other publicity material, in museum entry foyers on information desks where personnel, usually volunteers, answer directional questions and deal with inquiries about membership subscriptions and related matters.

What is contained in the brochures and maps is typically limited. The maps present floor plans for the museum as a whole, sometimes indexed by means of a table of contents if the museum is large and diverse so that one can quickly identify broad areas of the collections - where to go to find the ancient Egyptian artefacts or twentieth century American painting, for example. There may be special brochures with some information about important collections, but these tend to give only enough information to indicate why the collections deserve to be singled out for special attention.

The "docent" potential of maps in the physical museum is on the whole little developed. One can conceive of maps being devised for a variety of purposes. The more trails through the museum that can be devised and incorporated into maps, the more choice is offered the visitor. In a sense devising multifunctional maps might be thought of as offering a low cost approximation to constructing individual tours. But increasing the number of tour options increases the complexity of the process of representing them on printed maps. The visitor has also to be informed of the choices available and has to choose. Maps with many trails depicted on them (perhaps in different colours) become difficult to use. Printing different maps for the different tours decreases the complexity of the navigational task for the visitor but increases production costs as well as increasing the complexity of choosing the right map. Managing the paper problem also increases. The more maps and brochures there are, the greater is the difficulty of keeping them consistently available, given the arbitrary way in which such material is "consumed" by the public. On the whole most museums currently restrict themselves to general floor plans and some special brochures.
 
 

The Audio Guide

The museum's public educational function is traditionally discharged in a

much more purposive and dynamic way by a cadre of docents. A preliminary

form of automating the human docent is represented by the now common "audio-guide" consisting of an audio cassette tape and player; a kind of duplicated disembodied docent voice. These audio machines are available for hire and are often provided on the occasion of special exhibitions. In effect they offer the individual viewer a personal but, because their commentaries are fixed, necessarily invariant pre-recorded information about selected items

located throughout an exhibition. They provide a flexibility not possible with a live docent and a tour group and give the visitor freedom of movement through the collection. Visitors may begin an audio tour whenever they want. The audio-guide can be switched off and back on as the visitor takes a detour or backtracks and then resumes the tour, and they can repeat their commentary as often as needed.

The World of the Human Docent

Central to the "docent function" are human docents in all their human diversity. Theirs is a more complex educational role than is captured by the "audio-guide" or the brochures and other informative literature about the collections that a museum commonly provides. While there are some practical manuals and guides (e.g., Grinder and McCoy, 1985; King, 1997; Krockover and Hauk 1980; Love, 1994; Wressnig, 1999), there seems to be little "theoretical" writing on the role and functions of the docent.

The main tasks of docents as we see them are simply stated, though this simplicity conceals interesting complexities:

• Docents plan and offer tours;
• They work mostly with groups;
• They offered informed commentary;
• They are asked and answer individual questions.
• Proactively, they also often ask informed questions and facilitate dialogue among the participants in their tour groups, to help create a discussion from a variety of perspectives about the items being examined

The Docent’s General Background

Docents inevitably have different levels of specialist expertise. Some come to their work as a result of a broad but superficial interest in the overall field in which a museum operates. Others have extensive, detailed, formally based knowledge and training as represented by, say, a master’s or doctor’s degree. In this connection, curators may be thought of as functioning as docents when they offer regular tours and gallery- or exhibit- based lectures in the areas of their specialities.

Docents are often mature-age volunteers who may bring useful ancillary knowledge to their work (e.g. retired school teachers or university faculty), though some museums have special programs for high school or college students to act as docents working with peer groups or younger children (e.g. Carlisle, 1998; Philbrick, 1995). They have different levels of commitment to, and available time for, their work as docents – they are nearly always part-time, unpaid and inevitably present difficulties of scheduling for duty.

Inevitably they bring attitudes and opinions to their work that reflect, as they must, their own cultural and social world views. They may form judgements and offer comments that can be surprising or problematic on exhibitions which are usually designed to be challenging in some way or on particular items which are displayed for special attention because of their significance. This behaviour may subvert a curator’s stated intentions particularly if an exhibition is controversial. Drawing on Gable’s fascinating study of black and white tour guides in Williamsburg (Gable 1996) one might wonder at the "spin" an elderly retired male school teacher might give to information he is presenting to a group touring a Mapplethorpe exhibition or, in Australia, what editorialising a tour guide with One Nation sympathies might engage in when dealing with a challenging exhibition on multiculturalism or aboriginal land rights.

The Docent’s Selection and Training

Docents have to be selected and trained. To be effective, docents should have a number of desirable personal characteristics, such as retentive memories and well-developed expository skills. They should make a good appearance, be outgoing, flexible and comfortable with the public. They will also need a high level of general education.

Neophyte docents learn what they need to know in a variety of ways.

• The museum may offer a period of special classes and training;
• Docents may serve a period of apprenticeship attached to someone already experienced as a docent in the museum;
• They may be provided with museum publications or themselves undertake a program of reading about the museum and the field in which it operates;
• They necessarily belong to self-learning group whose members in effect teach each other about all aspects of "docenting."

The Docent’s Information Repertoire and personal skills

Experienced docents must be in command of an extensive information repertoire and of group process skills.

• They will be acquainted with the origins, history and mission of their museum and any special educational and outreach programs that it has in place;
• They will have a detailed understanding of the physical arrangement of the museum so that they can answer questions about where everything is from the location of the toilets to special items or exhibits;
• They will be fluent in the different narratives in which various kinds and levels of information are brought together as commentary for the various tours through the collections that they are responsible for;
• They will know "instinctively," a kind of tacit knowledge, what is likely to be most interesting to a particular person or group and how to adapt their "narratives" accordingly;
• They will have absorbed sufficient pedagogical and group-process information to allow them to deal effectively with different kinds of problematic situations as they arise, from unruly children to "know-it-all" adults;
• They will be specialized in terms of parts of the collections that they are interested in, have acquired the requisite knowledge about, and are responsible for presentations on. They may also specialize in client groups (some may work best with children, some with potential donors or donor groups).

But Docents are usually and necessarily limited both in the extent of their knowledge and in the opportunity tours provide for deploying the knowledge that they have. They will tend to know only so much as is necessary to deal with the tours for which they are responsible and the questions that these tours stimulate. Their knowledge will be a kind of routinised working knowledge and as a result the information they offer to the public may be somewhat patchy and a mixture of "scholarly" and popular information and even "misinformation" about particular items in the collections. Because tours are usually of a limited and specific duration – say, an hour or hour and a half - the docent may not have opportunity to deploy quite extensive knowledge in answer to questions or in relation to particular items or collections.

The Docent’s Primary Responsibility: the Tour Group

The Docent’s main tasks involve the conduct of tours. The question of why people take tours and what tours mean to them is an interesting one. For some, a guided tour is considered to be primarily educational. Others regard it as a cultural activity or an enhancement of the cultural activity involved in going to the museum. For many it is a combination of cultural experience, enriched leisure activity and a form of quick study. The ideal arrangement for most museum visitors would be to have a special personal tour with their own docent. As individualised tours are for the most part not feasible because of cost and the limited number and availability of docents, various compromise arrangements have been made. These include audio and group tours.

The tour group also emphasises the social aspect of museum visiting. Many visitors arrive in groups (couples, families, friends etc.) and discuss what they see and experience. This social interaction is part of the pleasure of the museum-going experience, as well as having significant educational importance. A docent can enhance this, by creating a larger social environment by making comments that help to provide a common framework for viewing items and for encouraging discussion of them. This adds a special social aspect for solitary visitors and may stimulate post tour conversations and discussion after the tour members resume their visit as separate groups.

The tour groups with which Docents tend to work can be small or large, though a natural limit is created by the necessity of being close enough to the docent to hear what he or she says. The major issue for the docent is that groups tend to be unique. Their membership is rarely the same. Groups vary in their level of interest, background knowledge, and patience. Thus what can happen in any group in terms of its dynamics and the questions which arise in it are unpredictable. This variability and unpredictability call for different responses from the docent in terms of presenting material that both captures and responds to interests that emerge in a particular group. But there are also, as mentioned above, typical problems for which the docent is prepared by experience and training, such as a group member who tries to capture the limelight with comments and questions that are distracting, or misbehaving children.

Tour groups can be formed randomly by members of the public presenting themselves at a particular gathering point at a particular time for a general, routine tour or for a special class or lecture. But groups may be created purposively in several ways. They can arise from the membership of various kinds of community organizations – for example, particular schools, Lions Clubs, Rotary, or churches – for which one or more classes or tours have been arranged. Occasionally there are special tours for those who have joined a museum as friends or who have made donations to it. School children of various ages are a particularly important client group. Classes and tours of various kinds can be customized to meet particular interests. That is to say groups also form around special aspects of a museum’s collections. Thus a group of "friends" might be given a tour of notable recent acquisitions. Another group might form to examine a special part of the collection – a time period, a geographical location, a special kind of artefact or exhibit.

Some limitations to the Docent’s Art

It can be argued that the informational and educational work of the docent is necessarily superficial in nature and subject to a number of critical limitations such as:

• The limited background of the docents themselves in terms of specialist knowledge and professional educational skills;
• The random composition and heterogeneous nature of the groups with which they deal;
• The necessarily limited duration of the tours or other educational programs for which they are responsible;
• An inevitable lack of depth in the prepared commentary that they offer;
• Frequent repetition of the commentary sometimes leading to mechanical and boring presentation;
• The necessity of offering quick, essentially off-the-cuff answers in a group to questions from individuals. Even when a knowledgeable answer to a question is possible, the pressures of the timetable and the presence of the group limit what is offered;
• Physical restrictions of access to museum collections. There is time to examine only a selected number of items and the selection for a tour has to be made only from those that are "on the way." The narrative cannot easily encompass - other than by incidental reference - relevant material that lies out of the tour’s ambit elsewhere in the museum, to say nothing of material not held by the museum.

On the other hand the docent is of critical importance to the guidance and educational functions of the museum. Docents directly engage the attention and interest of the members of a tour group. They can answer questions. They can ask questions. They can encourage and guide discussion and debate. They can respond effectively to random or unexpected incidents. In effect they have a performative function in engaging with and offering interpretations calibrated to a particular group or the individuals in a group They bring the museum and its collections alive in their "performances" and validate through their mediation the significance of those aspects of the collections that are their concern.

The Educational Context

Programs of docent activities are one of the important ways in which museums reach out to the public and discharge a broad educational function ( Rice, 1995; Roberts, 1997; Hooper-Greenhill,1992; Berry and Mayer 1989). In the most successful museums this function is influenced by and is responsive to:

• Acquisitions by purchase, gifts and bequests leading to ever growing collections;
• The creation of special exhibits designed to highlight the museum’s own collections
• Mounting travelling exhibitions of various kinds of which the "blockbuster" art exhibition is a prominent example
• Productive research programs through which new knowledge is constantly being made available about items already in or in the process of being added to the collections;
• Effective educational links to community groups, especially schools and colleges;
• Financial support from either individual or corporate philanthropists and donors who often underwrite the expense of special exhibits or acquisitions;
• Participation in state and federally funded programs.

• Public relations programming and publicity

• Devising coherent programs of classes, tours and other educational activities;
• Keeping these programs under constant revision so that they remain vital and relevant;
• Establishing creative links internally with curatorial staff and externally with community groups and agencies to identify programs that might be attractive to these external groups;
• Undertaking or managing the initial recruitment and training of docents;
• Ensuring effective scheduling of docents;
• Ensuring that mechanisms are in place and functioning appropriately to help keep docents up to date in such a way that their work mirrors and supports museum developments.

It is a truism to observe that museums are information rich environments. Their curators and other technical staff are experts in their subject fields and their expertise is constantly being further developed by research and curatorial activities in the collections. Museums often have quite extensive publication programs devoted to their collections and exhibits. Larger museums often maintain a library with resources of both a substantive and a professional kind sufficient to sustain the research and educational programs of the museum. These libraries are increasingly able to take advantage of resources that are available on the Web and through the Internet. Visiting experts of various kinds often can be found at work in the collections or in the libraries, thus bringing to the Museum their special knowledge. Both curators and visiting scholars through email and the Internet are members of various networked professional and scholarly communities within which information is constantly being exchanged.

However, docents or members of the general public are generally unable to participate directly or easily in, and so benefit from the richness of, this environment. It is essentially made up of uncoordinated levels and kinds of personnel, print and other resources. >From the docents’ point of view, the superficialities referred to above are inherent in the way in which their work is defined in the organisation. They do not have opportunity when asked questions on their tours, for example, for researching answers (even if they knew what was involved) as, say a museum reference librarian routinely does in pursuing answers to questions his or her clients raise. They may not know about nor have immediate access to the specialist works that the museum publishes. They cannot easily consult expert curators or visiting scholars because direct contact with them may be constrained formally by explicit policies governing lines of communication in a particular museum and tacitly by the subtleties of organisational culture involving status hierarchies and reward systems. In any case the availability of such experts necessarily has to be limited by their primary responsibilities for the collections under their care. All docents can do is to answer questions to the best of their ability and guide questioners to general sources of information about something of interest. They might recommend, for example, the museum library or the museum shop, or perhaps suggest contact with the appropriate curator by means of a telephone call or letter.

These limitations are compounded for ordinary members of the public who will generally be quite ignorant about the way in which the museum functions. They will not know who has the specialist knowledge and expertise that might be relevant to their interests. They may not know that there is a library or what the museum publications are, even if they are displayed in the museum shop, which will be selling all sorts of other things as well. It is fair to conclude that in the past, because of organisational and technological constraints, the potential value of the museum as an information resource both for many of the museum’s own staff (such as docents) as well as for the general public has not been realisable.

Summary

A museum is much more than its collection. Various techniques are used to ‘add value’ to its collection, including the use of human docents. These techniques are manifestations of the Docent Function. The Docent Function is about the provision of information, guidance and education as to

• Which artefacts to see

• Which order to see artefacts in
• How to see artefacts in different ways
• How to understand or interpret artefacts
• Where to find background information on the artefacts
• How artefacts fit into their cultural context
• How to compare an artefact with other artefacts
• How artefacts can aid understanding of abstract concepts and theories, in science and technology museums for example

The discussion above identifies a range of ways that the docent function is carried out in the real world, using many complex and subtle techniques, particularly in the case of the actual performance of docents. But we have also identified some existing limitations and restrictions. The electronic environment allows us to envisage ways in which these restrictions and limitations might be transcended. With appropriately digitised collections and other resources, we suggest that it is possible to enhance the "docent function" of a particular museum, both by creating a virtual counterpart but also by creating possibilities for the interaction of the virtual and the real. The digital relaxation of the temporal, physical and organizational barriers of the real world makes it possible to envision the entire museum as a seamless, interactive informative and learning environment.

Clearly the most obvious physical limitation is the necessity of being able to travel to the museum. The opportunities offered by the web are now being seized by hundreds of museums, both as a means of making their collections more accessible to those unable to travel, creating virtual museums, but also as a form of advertising to encourage actual physical visits and revisits. Furthermore, in the virtual museum, collections can be merged so that it is possible to design exhibitions containing digital artefacts that have never been assembled in the same physical space in any museum. We begin our exploration of the docent function in the virtual museum, and then move to the physical museum.

A museum website my be entirely focussed on advertising the physical museum, perhaps also with a means of ordering online from the gift shop. In such cases, the goal of the site is not substantially different from many commercial and non-profit websites. Good design and a significant focus on usability are essential (Nielsen, 1993), but the docent function does not apply. In the rest of this paper, we assume that something more is intended, something that better justifies the term of virtual museum.

Assumptions

Our discussion is guided by a number of assumptions about digitisation, the nature of the virtual museum and the relationships that might exist between the virtual and the real that need to be discussed at some length. We assume that a digital representation has been achieved of a significant subset of the museum’s collection. In the same way that a human docent requires that at least part of the physical collection be on display, a Cyberdocent requires that at least part of the collection be available in virtual form. We also assume that this representation includes high quality images, and that appropriate metadata have been developed and assigned.

In our view docent functionality is as important a requirement in the digital environment as it is in the physical museum environment. In the same way that a museum is not merely a physical storehouse or repository of artefacts that has been organised to enable the most efficient access to those artefacts, a virtual museum is not merely a database of digitised images linked to powerful information retrieval software (Blackaby and Sandore, 1997). Such a database is more aptly described as a virtual collection, to the formation which many museum digitisation projects seem to limit themselves. Clearly the creation of such a database and easy to use access to it is necessary for the creation of a virtual museum but it is not sufficient. To transform a virtual collection into a virtual museum requires the addition of docent functions like those described in part 1, but manifested through the new technology in radically different ways.

The Cyberdocent

We have introduced the term, Cyberdocent, to represent the implementation of different docent functions using computing technology, though any particular Cyberdocent need not embody all the docent functions outlined in part 1. Though our references are sometimes anthropomorphic, the Cyberdocent should not be considered as a robotic alternative to a human docent, nor exclusively as an approach to replacing human docents. One of our main aims is to identify ways in which the docent functionality of the museum can be enhanced by the creative interaction of the human and the digital.

It is important to note that in the discussion of Cyberdocent possibilities, the distinction between the real and the virtual museum soon becomes blurred. A visitor may be physically present in the museum, but by interacting with the museum’s web pages in a computer room, may also be present in the virtual museum. Similarly, a potential visitor interacting remotely with the Cyberdocent may collect information and materials off site that will have a surrogate docent function when he or she actually visits the physical museum.

The Cyberdocent in the Virtual Museum

The digital environment allows us to categorise museum visitors in new ways. To the real visitor we can now add the remote digital visitor, whose numbers like their locations are potentially limitless. The kinds of digital docent functionality we envision would allow anyone anywhere in the world to interact with a museum in ways hitherto unimaginable. But another important category is the potentialreal visitor who can digitally "case the joint" in planning an actual visit. Such a real visitor might well become a follow-updigital visitor, someone who, having visited the museum physically, wants to explore further digitally what he or she has seen.

In what follows we deal first of all with virtual tours and the physical arrangement of the museum and its collections. We turn then to the notion of Cyberdocent and a consideration of new kinds of informative commentary. The Cyberdocent will naturally have important implications for different museum user groups – visitors and staff alike – and we explore some of these before concluding with the proposition that the implementation of the Cyberdocent, as we conceive it, has important implications for the museum as a learning environment.

The Website As Foyer

The home page of a virtual museum serves in many ways as the equivalent of an entry foyer (actually this role may extend over more than one page). As well as publicity and advertising, basic information about opening hours and how to get to the museum, it will also have similar functions to the information desk of the real museum. The kinds of general information provided at such desks could easily be replicated digitally. The pamphlet material freely offered but often displaced or for various reasons unavailable in print format could be made inexhaustibly available digitally. Of course terminals in the museum foyer could also make this digital information available in the museum itself for the real museum visitor.

The Virtual Tour

The transformation of the databases created by museum digitisation efforts into a virtual museum occurs, as we have mentioned above, only with the provision of docent-like facilities to help people navigate the database, including the provision of virtual tours with all that this means of selectivity and mediation. Just as a physical museum supports informative guided tours past multiple artefacts arranged in a meaningful relationship to each other, as well as easy and rapid access to a particular artefact of interest to a particular visitor (once he or she knows where it is located or has been told where to find it), so a virtual museum should provide similar tours through its database in addition to offering direct access to the database. Such tours might be seen as complementing the efficient random access functionality which databases are designed to optimise.

Virtual tours could be of two basic kinds. Some tours could be set or prearranged. In effect, they would be the virtual equivalent of the tours conducted by the docent in the real museum. But virtual tours could also be individualised and tailored to particular needs and interests in a way that is rarely possible in the real museum There would need be no limit to the number or nature of such tours which would be constructed on the fly according to individual specifications.

The set or prearranged tours, like those of the docent in the real museum, would be designed to respond to recognised general interests and to reflect the museum’s own view of what is important, most distinctive and valuable in its collections. These tours, relatively few in number, in effect would reflect the "master" arrangement of a particular museum’s collections. They could be inflexible in the sense that once joined the visitor would have to follow them through. This option would be useful for special groups such as school children to ensure that they viewed something specified by their teacher. But the tours could be made flexible so that a visitor could depart from what is prescribed at any point to follow a particular idea or interests and then return. In this way what is set and what is individualised would begin to shade into each other.

The Cyberdocent, for example, might offer an introductory tour of familiarisation of the museum in part or as a whole. Such a tour could be at different levels of detail and completeness, from something rapid, highly selective and introductory to a kaleidoscopic inspection of the museum’s entire collections. The virtual visitor could be conducted at his or her pace through any or all of the galleries of interest in the real museum, responding immediately as the tour progressed to any changes of direction or interest. Someone with no opportunity actually to visit the museum could inspect its collections according to his or her interest; as a virtual tourist he or she could wander at will in the collections. Someone planning to visit the museum but with limited time could be offered suggestions about, and a preliminary inspection of, what he or she might want to see in the time available. An individual itinerary might then be planned – an individual map – to ensure that the visitor saw in an efficient way all that he or she wished to see. Having been to the museum, the visitor might make use of the Cyberdocent to re-examine digitally items in the collections in greater depth and at greater leisure.

The use of virtual reality techniques allow the virtual visitor in effect to travel around the physical space of the museum. In this way the primary relationships the museum has established between artefacts and collections can become evident. But the intransigence of the physical arrangements of the real museum and the limitations on what can be displayed may now be overcome. The Cyberdocent can be asked to create other kinds of arrangements and to find additional items for display. Indeed, the Cyberdocent might incorporate suggestions from curators about how the visitor might rearrange and supplement what is initially provided so that important historical or geographical or other relationships might be "constructed" at will.

Advantages Of The Virtual Tour

In many ways, a virtual tour must be considered a poor second best to a real, physical tour. After all, for most people, the point of visiting a museum is to see "the real thing" (Clutten, 1996; Pearce 1994; Bowen 1997; Moore, 1997 especially ch. 7)). Nevertheless, a virtual tour has certain advantages:

• Hitherto restricted or transitory access to collections can be overcome;
• The constraints on the availability of additional information (including but not limited to text) imposed by a physical environment do not apply;
• Additional views of artefacts (such as magnifications, x-rays and reconstructions) can be more easily made available. It becomes possible to inspect materials at a level of detail and in relation to other materials not usually possible in the real museum where items may be locked in cabinets, have to be looked at from a distance, may be arranged so that only one view is possible and are fixed in their relationships with items on either side and around them;
• The artefacts to be displayed on a particular tour need not be constrained by physical location. It is possible to construct an easy to follow tour of artefacts ordered by a logical arrangement or reflecting a special interest but actually positioned physically in the real museum in many different rooms or even in storage areas. In the real museum such a tour would require marching back and forth around the museum. Digitally all of the collections are potentially available for inspection and re-organisable in virtual space;
• Artefacts from different museums can be combined in tours (assuming that the problems of metadata, permissions and copyright are resolved);
• Special exhibitions and their tours can be preserved in cyberspace even after their constituent artefacts are dispersed to their regular locations in different galleries of the museum, to storage or back to other museums and lenders.

The development of the museum virtual tour can draw on much related work. Researchers have advocated tours for any kind of large, potentially confusing collection of hypertext (Bush, 1945; Trigg, 1988; Furuta et al., 1997; Hammond and Allison, 1987). Virtual tours can vary too in the nature and complexity of the technologies needed to support them. One can envisage several different kinds of virtual tour:

• The visitor follows a pre-planned trail through the information space. There may be options to leave the trail and to return. There may be many trails and different ways of helping the visitor to choose between them. This approach is most similar to the pre-printed trail map in a physical museum.

• Trails may also be generated, where a visitor specifies interests, background, goals, time constraints etc. and the software uses this information to construct an individualised trail, either directly from the set of artefacts and informational pages, or from fragments of pre-existing trails. We are not aware of any work on this intriguing possibility.

• By use of web –based Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) technologies (Trevor et al., 1997; Bentley et al., 1997; Palfreyman and Rodden, 1996), a visitor may be made aware of other visitors taking the same tour at the same time and given the opportunity to chat to them using for example Internet Relay Chat, or a MOO. This restores partially some of the social aspect of museum visiting. As with the digital library, the digital museum is in danger of being considered as the private, solitary resource, even claiming this as an unalloyed advantage (Twidale, 1995).

• Instead of a pre-planned trail, the visitor may actually take an accompanied guided tour, but mediated by CSCW technologies. The docent (presumably, but not necessarily) located at the museum would guide the progression through the web pages, providing interpretative commentary as in a conventional physical guided tour, but mediated by whatever technologies are available, such as text chat, shared audio (one or two way) or even shared video. This approach is similar to remote help-giving interactions, such as technical support or remote reference (Twidale & Nichols 1999).

• The accompanied guided tour may be taken in the company of other participants, as with most museum tours or museum based classes. The technological requirements are a little more complex, especially to support interaction back from the participants to the docent (and also between the tour participants, who may want to chat to each other, or whisper so as not to interrupt the docent), but it is more cost effective of the docent’s time than an exclusive individual tour. Again, this possibility emphasizes the important social dimension of tour-taking or participating in a class with others.

Advanced technologies can provide cyberdocent functions for visitors actually present in the museum. Virtual trails, whether pre-arranged or individualised, in effect can be represented by digital versions of printed maps but without some of the limitations and complexities created by a large number of maps or multifunctional maps discussed earlier. This has distinct advantages for the visitors to the real museum as well as remote visitors. Computers and printers, for example, solve the problem of providing multiple maps for different pre-arranged or specially generated tours through the collections. Rather than many different pieces of paper or complex maps containing multiple overlapping routes, visitors could select a predetermined tour or they could generate a tour relating to their particular interests. They could even select a language and the nature and amount of accompanying information they require. This could be printed off as needed at home, days prior to the intended visit, or in the museum’s computer room or at an information desk, minutes prior to embarking on the tour.

From Text And Audio Guides To CD-ROMS

Another form of digitisation is beginning to play an enhanced role and has potential for enhancing even more the effectiveness of tours within the real museum. As our discussion in Part 1 indicates, we can regard the audio guide as an early example of Cyberdocent technology. With new technologies come new opportunities. CD-ROMs are now being used for these audio tours. They have better sound quality than the audio tapes used hitherto in audio guides. But more importantly they can hold a huge store of information which can be accessed randomly, whereas audio tapes hold only a limited amount of information which has to be accessed sequentially. Thus, with CD-ROM it is possible to design mechanisms that enable a user to move at his or her own pace and in any order through the collections, retrieving the commentary related to particular items in an exhibition as needed by inputting a code provided near the item. Moreover it is possible, given the capacity of CD-ROMs to envision the provision of multiple audio extracts in order to offer commentary in various languages or at different levels of detail or focusing on different aspects of the artefacts. Thus one extract might be geared to children, another might offer general overview information and another provide more detailed information. However, the amount of audio data that can be held on CD-ROMS is itself limited and the increased multimedia capacity of DVD technology provides new opportunities for greater flexibility in the amount and kinds of information that can be presented.

Informative Commentary in an Information Rich Environment

So far we have been considering some of the implications of viewing, touring and manipulating the digitised artefacts and collections. The example of the use of CD-ROM and DVD-ROM above, however, suggests ways in which new kinds of informative commentary may become possible. In the digital environment, too, it is no longer necessary to consider the resources of the museum, the library and the archive as distinctively different from each other (Rayward, 1998). We argue that the Cyberdocent will eventually enable the museum to transcend those limitations that made it into the problematic information environment discussed earlier. The Cyberdocent could have the capacity to offer selectively a range and depth of information far beyond the capacities and situation of the real docent. We think of this as creating systems that will allow us to augment the representations of artefacts and the collections into which they have been assembled with multiple layers of meaning. All of these layers will be conceptually available to anyone who might wish to make use of them but invisible to those who do not. Ultimately this complex function would involve the integration and coordination of sound, graphics, text, animation and "living" expertise (there will still be a vital role for human docents) which the Cyberdocent can make differentially accessible.

Among the more common sources of information that could be digitised and integrated as we move to implement this functionality are:

• Artefact labels;
• Supplemental information about the artefact
• Overview statements that introduce collections and statements that are placed at the entrance to individual galleries or that mark the parts of special exhibitions;
• Museum catalogues and handbooks;
• Articles and reports by museum personnel;
• Slides, videos, and other representations of items in the collection or related items outside it
• Depending on the nature of the museum, archival film or video clips of artists, archeologists, zoologists, anthropologists, conservators etc either talking about or at work on items in the collection or related to them
• Games and puzzles designed to enhance especially the interaction of children with what is represented in the collections

With access to such sources, the Cyberdocent could present factual and contextual information at different levels of difficulty and completeness about particular items. This might range, as mentioned above, from what might be suitable for a young child to a highly educated member of the general public, to a scholar investigating a special problem. The information could vary from the equivalent of a brief label, to fuller information from the museum’s exhibit catalogues, to an extended scholarly paper by a curator. Relevant entries in a general encyclopedia might be followed by the interrogation of the museum library’s catalogue for reports and documents available online in the museum itself, and these could be followed by access to external sources available through the Internet. The Cyberdocent might suggest alternative or increasingly complex analytic frameworks for an item or exhibit or collection, along with the relevant supporting documents, that would introduce viewers to the range of interpretations and historically divergent positions that are possible in explaining their significance.

Such sources may be mobilised remotely. But it is also possible to envisage them being mobilised in situ within the museum itself especially for educational and scholarly purposes. With the capacity of CD and DVD-ROM technology and the development of newer handheld display devices, it is possible to envisage a visitor making an intensive on site inspection of a physical collection or individual artefact at the same time having immediate reference to digitised scholarly resources of various kinds. In effect he or she carries a "library" into the presence of the physical artefact, thus overcoming the hitherto inconvenient physical disjunction in certain kinds of research between inspecting an artefact and consulting the literature about it .

As we relate the systems that manage the integration of information sources with those that manage virtual tours, the distinction between class and tour will become blurred. Casual and highly selected overviews of exhibits can modulate effortlessly into detailed research. What is provided for a group, such as a class of school children, can at any moment become individualized to respond to the interest of a member of the group. The activities and functions of hitherto differentiated personnel such as curators and docents can be brought together when this is useful. Finally, we are able to exploit in a highly controlled and purposive way the semi-permeable boundary between what is present in the museum and what is located outside it.

Individual Clients and Client Groups

The Cyberdocent should have the capability of responding to individuals as such, and also to groups as though they were individuals. When in the virtual environment, the difficulties the human docent faces in dealing with groups and individuals in groups might be transcended by the Cyberdocent. It will be able to identify members of a group for whom special arrangements have been made (such as a class of school children, or a member of a community group) and guide them through the special virtual tour that has been created for them. It may be programmed to remember visitors whose virtual tours seem to have been interrupted or who are returning to see and learn more or who want to revisit something that they have already inspected. It will be able to answer the individual visitor’s questions, either directly if the question is a commonly occurring one, or if necessary, as indicated above, by inquiries directed to curatorial and other staff.
 

The Cyberdocent should also be programmed to assemble transactional data, to be used and interpreted by itself, or more likely the museum staff, to improve its own work. Such data might be of a kind that would help identify, depending on demographic variables of various kinds, what the most popular items and exhibits are and the most desirable sequences in which they are to be viewed. What, for example, are the most popular tours through the museum for children of a certain age? Feedback could be collected from visitors to produce an analysis of issues and problems that are inherent in the digital representation of the museum’s collections and work or in the activities of the Cyberdocent itself. This information in turn can be used to make tailored recommendations to new visitors based on correlations in the data of what proved of interest to similar visitors (Hill & Hollan, 1992; Twidale et al. 1998).

The Cyberdocent as a Resource for the Human Docent and the Education Officer

As mentioned above, our speculations about Cyberdocents should not be considered as suggesting that we automate or replace the human docent. The human docent’s performative function, his or her personal engagement with groups and individuals in bringing the collections alive on a tour as discussed earlier, is something that cannot and should not be replicated by the Cyberdocent. Nevertheless, it is possible that the work of docents can be materially assisted by the Cyberdocent providing a kind of docent’s toolkit. Aspects of docent induction and training, access to authoritative information, help in planning tours and answering question can all be part of this.

A Docent Toolkit, for example, might involve a database of tour information that is effectively a repository of some of the knowledge and experiences the museum’s docents have garnered over long periods on the job. It might contain jokes, suggested activities, stories, ways of dealing with particular items or members of the public, things that worked, things that did not in adapting tours to different kinds of groups - the sort of information that could be useful for putting together a tour on the fly. It might be seen as a kind of organisational memory (Walsh and Ungson, 1991). In addition to this informal information, it would supply consistent and authoritative information about all aspects of existing tours. It would contain frequently asked questions about items in the collections or the museum itself and accurate and detailed answers to them. There might be notes for a non-specialist docent to replicate an expert’s tour when he or she is not available. Berry (1998) notes the possibilities of a virtual docent supporting docents as a community of learners, continually updating their skills.

Part of the toolkit might consist of programs to help in the preparation of new tours by facilitating the assembling and organising of information, the planning of routes and so on. Related to this might be learning kits or training modules for docents that introduce the museum, its collections, and the tours for which they will be responsible. Here again, the Cyberdocent would ensure that authoritative information was being made consistently available. The Cyberdocent might offer preservation tools that would facilitate capturing particular tours or the preparation that went into them and preserving them for later use.

One could imagine the docent being able to distribute to a particular kind of group new kinds of information such as special printouts telling the tour’s particular "story" along with any additional information of interest to that group. There need be no problem of unavailability or inappropriateness as happens with bulk printed materials.

Such a toolkit might also be used by museum education officers. Their work could be seen as more centrally important to the museum than ever before. Their planning of various educational programs could be enhanced by the kind of data being collected about both real and virtual museum use. They could be assisted with the scheduling and instruction of docents as mentioned above. They could interact with various community groups in a more extensive way. Their mediation role in general communication between different levels and kinds of staff within the museum could be facilitated, not least by the kinds of communication that could enrich the Docent Toolkit. They would need to be centrally involved in the design and implementation of Cyberdocent functionality.

Vision of the Future: A Seamless Interactive Learning Environment

The set of functions we have identified and labelled the Cyberdocent make the collections of a particular museum, enhanced in a variety of ways, available both to the virtual visitor located outside the museum and within it to the real visitor and to the human docent. Our vision is that the Cyberdocent enables effortless transition between inexhaustively various tours and the interactions characteristic of a lecture theatre or class room. Casual sequential viewing can at any moment become stationary in-depth analysis and research. Authoritative information of various kinds can be systematically and consistently made available within these different contexts. The limitations of what is held in a particular museum and how it is arranged can be overcome as arrangements are manipulated and as images and information from other places are incorporated. What we have created in this way may be described as a seamless interactive learning environment able to respond to the full range of needs and interests of a potentially endlessly diverse clientele.

Conclusion: Practicalities, current work and future research

This paper has raised a range of complex technical problems some of which are beyond immediate solution. However, as we have made clear, some aspects of the docent’s work are already either the subject of considerable research and development or could be illuminated by the use of technologies available in other contexts. The Cyberdocent, for example, will need to have access to the various collaboratively developed digital collections that exist or that are being planned. The linking of digitised museum publications to the virtual collections and creating within the real museum the information layering capability discussed above may be more a logistical than a technical problem in that most publications are now prepared in machine-readable form. Marty has explored the application of collaborative technologies in integrating more effectively various sources of expertise within individual museum (Marty, 1999). It should be possible to adapt some of the techniques of managing transactional data in various commercial applications to create systems for generating access and use data. Implementing some considerable proportion of Cyberdocent functionality (and it is not necessary for all aspects to be in place for it to begin to be useful) may be less a matter of new technological developments than setting task priorities and acquiring the financial resources needed to use or modify existing technology in carrying out these tasks.

Yet, underlying much of this discussion are assumptions that need further investigation if we are to achieve the level of sophistication that would make the Cyberdocent uniquely effective. We believe that more detailed study of existing practice will greatly enhance the design of new technological alternatives. We do not know with any degree of complexity or subtlety, for example, what actually happens to individuals or groups in their interactions with aspects of the museum, including the human docent (see on this point Zorich, 1997). Nor do we know what goes into how docents assess the nature and needs of particular groups. What is the repertoire of responses that they have at their command and how do they access, refine, enlarge and mobilize it? To go below the surface of such questions and beyond the apparently self-evident, requires studies that draw on ethnographic techniques of the kind that have been employed by Hemmings et al. (1998a&b). The results of such work could then be used to inform the development of systems that would increase Cyberdocent functionality in new and powerful ways. Our view is that with adequate planning and resources, a coherent implementation of versions of the kinds of functionality we have discussed in this paper is entirely possible in the immediate future. This provision of cyberdocent functions will enable us to enhance the experience of visitors to physical museums and enable existing digital collections truly to become virtual museums.

Acknowledgements:

The authors wish to acknowledge Paul Marty of the World Heritage Museum at the University of Illinois and the doctoral program in the Graduate School of Library and information Science. He has made innumerable useful comments and suggestions as our work has unfolded. We also offer special thanks to Peter Samis, Associate Curator of Education and Program Manager, Interactive Educational Technologies at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He read the paper with a special care andwe have incorporated most of his suggestions into the paper often in the very words that he used.

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