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Sarah's CD query raises an interesting point - why are so few museum catalogues available online? Apologies for the length of this post/rant, but it's a topic dear to my heart. As Tom says, it is technically almost trivial, and a lot of the very best software technology (eg Apache or Xitami webservers, MySQL, PHP etc) is freeware. Hardware requirements are also trivial. There are plenty of Council, University and ISP webservers around for free, or low-cost hosting. Hosting your own is easy: most small and medium-sized museums, and probably most large ones, could easily run a Website including dynamic catalogue searching, on the cheapest PC it's possible to buy just now, or an old redeployed one. The only non-trivial requirement would be a permanent Ethernet or other broadband connection. Security on a Webserver sounds like a big problem, but is not actually any worse than any other internet-connected activity, such as reading email. Acceptably securing a server is not hard. For the paraniod, don't have your webserver logged on to your in-house fileservers. Again, any half-competent IT person, and a lot of people who are not, know this, and can do it. Why are these things not being done? Maybe our catalogues are full of technical terms and boring info. So what? They are just that - catalogues. Nobody expects a library catalogue to be exciting. Making them searchable and available "as is" would still be a massive step forward in public access to collections. This is not a substitute for other kinds of resources, but an invaluable adjunct or first step. Maybe our computer catalogues are not complete. Again, so what? Doing something is better than nothing. And, if you do it right, your web-seachable dataset can be updated automatically (eg weekly) as you add records to your computer catalogue. The setup work can just as well be done now as later. Maybe people are worried about storage locations, valuations or the DPA? Just omit sensitive info from the on-line database. A single simple query will usually be enough to do this prior to export. Bingo! Most of the useful and interesting information will still be there for the public. OK, you do need a bit of programming expertise to use things like PHP, ASP etc. However, these skills are very widespread, and compared with most other kinds of programming, very easily learnt. Very simple searchable search pages for an existing database can probably be done in less than a day. OK, after that, you can be as fancy as you like, and spend as much as you want, but the basics are easy. Computing students may be able to assist as part of eg final year projects. Again, any museum, University, or Council IT department should have people who can do this, or supervise it - why is it not happening? These waters are often made out to be deep and murky. They are not: come on in - the water's lovely! John PS The Hunterian's relatively cheapo efforts can be seen at: http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk hosted on a PC in the corner of my office. The data are far from perfect, but they are still useful and popular with users. I'd recommend the Whistler dataset as being nice and image-rich with well-edited records. Image capture, and record editing of the Whistler dataset was more expensive than all the hardware, software and programmer time required to set up the Whistler search tools, and all the other search tools here. Dr JW Faithfull Hunterian Museum Annex University of Glasgow 13 Thurso St Glasgow G11 6PE Tel:0141 330 4213 Fax:0141 330 8001 Email: [log in to unmask]