Virtual Library museums pages
The Virtual Library museums pages formed an early leading directory of online museums around the world. The resource was founded by Jonathan Bowen in 1994, originally at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory in the United Kingdom, It has been supported by the International Council of Museums and Museophile Limited. as part of the World Wide Web Virtual Library, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee and later managed by Arthur Secret. The main VLmp site moved to London South Bank University in the early 2000s and is now hosted as a wiki on Wikia.
The directory was developed and organised in a distributed manner by country, with around twenty people in different countries maintaining various sections. Canada, through the Canadian Heritage Information Network, was the first country to become involved. The MDA maintained the United Kingdom section of museums, later the Collections Trust. The Historisches Centrum Hagen has maintained and hosted pages for Germany.
Other countries actively participating included Romania. In total, around 20 countries were involved.
The directory was influential in the museum field during the 1990s and 2000s. It was used as a standard starting point to find museums online. It was useful for monitoring the growth of museums internationally online. It was also used for online museum surveys. It was recommended as an educational resource and included a search facility.
