One thought on this :
I'm guessing here, but I suspect that the total energy used by a hundred
people paying one visit to a museum is orders of magnitude higher than the
total energy required to support the infrastructure for the same hundred to
access the collections online for a year.
Example : I'm an instrument maker. If I can get detailed plans and
photographs of the Queen Mary Harp online, I don't need to visit Edinburgh.
That saves the carbon emissions and energy from a five-hour car trip, which
I reckon would power my share of the museum's server for quite some time.
I'm sure energy savings could be made within the infrastructure, but the
real savings would come about by proving a comprehensive virtual experience
and discouraging people from physically visiting. Whether that's a good
idea, or whether it would work, is another question.
Paul Baker
Renaissance Musician, Instrument Maker,
Computer Maestro and lots of other things.
Diabolus in Musica and Midlands Early Music Forum
[log in to unmask]
www.diabolus.org
P.S. Query - if I can get my harp information cheaply by post, how does that
affect the energy equation?
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