A significant number of museums have now had Web
sites for several years. However, a Web site that is not maintained
and developed regularly starts to look tired and outdated much
more quickly than the matching physical organization because of
the fast-changing nature of the technology, and hence also the
expectations of many on-line users. This paper explores what museums
have achieved so far and discusses what second-generation museum
Web sites might consider adding to their on-line facilities, through
consideration of the results from two on-line museum surveys.
The first surveyed virtual museum visitors, which may be
a useful consideration for museums thinking about updating their
Web site. The second more recent survey covers virtual museum
sites themselves, and illustrates the current situation
with respect to a significant cross-section of museum Web sites.
Both surveys were undertaken in cooperation with the Virtual Library
museums pages (VLmp), an on-line directory of museums.
Earlier this century, the following widely (mis)quoted
statement was made:
If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.
- Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) The Nature of the
Physical World (1928)
More recently the following retort was made in the
"Quotes of the Week" section of a national newspaper
in the United Kingdom:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging
on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire
works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this
is not true.
- Robert Wilensky (born 1951) Mail on Sunday (16
February 1997)
The Internet certainly is full of a lot of rubbish,
but the same can be said of the physical world. However, museums
act as repositories of objects and associated information (sometimes
grandly known as "metadata" for virtual objects in the
world of information technology) which are worth saving for posterity.
The role of the curator is to judge which artefacts are worth
saving and then to preserve and, if possible, to display them
in some form. Thus most museums are in the position of having
a collection of interesting objects and information (both written
and mental) worthy of presentation on-line for educational, research,
and even entertainment and money-making purposes. Many organizations
have no such resources. The problem of course is overcoming the
barriers of the presentation technology, which may be problematic
due to lack of expertise or lack of funds.
Even though the age of the "wired museum"
is upon us (Jones-Garmil, 1997), there is still a significant
way to go before the majority of the world's museums are on-line.
Many (especially smaller and non-American) museums have yet to
establish an Internet presence themselves because of the technological
and financial barriers. However, a significant number have established
a Web presence for several years and are now considering how this
should be developed for the future. Certainly museums should avoid
adding to the "rubbish" of the Internet and ensure that
their Web sites are up to date and lively. Maintenance is a significant
problem for any organization with a Web site and a budget for
its continued development needs to be made on an annual basis.
The session associated with this paper considers
the problem of museums which have established a Web presence,
but now wish to develop this further. What facilities and information
are worthwhile and cost-effective for museums to make available
on-line? Of course the answer will vary for different institutions,
depending on their size, resources, physical location, collections,
technological expertise, etc. In this session, four case studies
are considered by the people directly involved.
Eija Liukkonen and Riikka Haapalainen have been involved
with the revision of the Finnish National Gallery's Web pages
(Liukkonen & Haapalainen, 1999). After three years since their
establishment, the pages have been completely overhauled, using
the latest technical Web facilities such as Cascading Style Sheets
(which allow greater control of fonts, etc., on recent Web browsers)
and HTML Version 4.0 Web page markup. A user survey was undertaken
to gain feedback before the changes were made. The pages are stylish
and modern in design which matches the image of both Finland in
general and the gallery in particular. Special attention has been
given to navigation around the site. A good rule of thumb is that
users should be able to move on from a given navigation page within
5 seconds of viewing it. Most Web users are relatively impatient
given the amount of resources available and will go elsewhere
if a site is confusing to traverse or slow to load.
The Museum of Science in Boston, USA originally produced
a Web site in 1995 since demonstrating new technologies is part
of its remit. Four years later, without a great sense of direction
for the Web site during this time, the museum is now considering
the purpose of the Web site. A committee within the museum has
been considering this for almost a year. Edward Rodley, an exhibit
planner at the museum, discusses the current situation at the
museum and its plans for the future (Rodley, 1999).
Sarah Kenderdine of the Powerhouse Museum, Australia
discusses the Australian Museums On-Line (AMOL) resource (Kenderdine,
1999). This provides a gateway (or "metacenter") for
searching national distributed museum collections which has recently
undergone a major redesign. 350,000+ museum records are accessible
for an impressively fast keyword (and field-selectable) search
via the Internet. A useful feature is the restriction of the search
to records which include an image. A researcher will normally
be interested in all records available, whereas a typical museum
visitor (and especially children) may only wish to access record
where the object can actually be seen.
Finally the Technisches Museum Wien in Austria is
considering more futuristic developments, based on ideas from
the world-renowned MIT Media Lab. Otmar Moritsch from the museum
and Harald Krämer, a museum consultant, discuss how future
visitors could interact with an object in an immersive environment
using artificial intelligence techniques (Moritsch & Krämer,
1999). This will be tested in the museum first, since state-of-the-art
Silicon Graphics equipment is required, but could be made available
on-line in due course. Increasing interaction with the visitor,
perhaps improving the educational possibilities of museum Web
sites, will be possible in the future (Bowen & Haughton, 1997).
The rest of this paper considers the results of two
on-line museums surveys, especially with respect to their impact
on how museums may wish to consider the updating of their Web
sites.
Virtual museums interact with virtual visitors, just
as real museum interact with real visitors. This section considers
the results of two surveys, one of virtual visitors and one of
virtual museums, and tries to draw some conclusions on how the
results should influence the development of museum Web sites.
| Year: | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 |
| Month: | |||||
| January | 21 143 | 32 389 | 69 372 | 104 292 | |
| February | 24 482 | 43 849 | 71 859 | 101 066 | |
| March | 32 251 | *40 817 | 71 842 | 104 430 | |
| April | 29 458 | 40 909 | 67 838 | 109 724 | |
| May | 25 436 | 49 926 | 61 848 | 103 074 | |
| June | 23 298 | 43 408 | 59 749 | 91 411 | |
| July | 20 534 | 46 287 | 60 665 | 79 234 | |
| August | 3 459 | 19 562 | 48 457 | 58 534 | 84 884 |
| September | 8 749 | 21 204 | 50 878 | 68 955 | 62 344 |
| October | 12 575 | 20 804 | 62 127 | 87 751 | 71 343 |
| November | 14 997 | 26 087 | 63 571 | 85 043 | 64 227 |
| December | 17 284 | 29 463 | 61 520 | 79 756 | 56 119 |
| Average: | 11 413 | 24 477 | 48 678 | 70 268 | 86 012 |
| Year: | 57 064 | 293 722 | 584 138 | 843 213 | 1 032 148 |
| Total: | 57 064 | 350 786 | 934 924 | 1 778 137 | 2 810 285 |
* From March 1996 this has been collected using a
graphical counter rather than "hits" to the main page
in the Web site statistics log file since the resource is now
mirrored at a number of sites around the world.
Virtual visitor statistics can be collected both
automatically and through surveys via electronic forms and email.
As an example of automatic collection of information, visitor
statistics for the Virtual Library museums pages (Bowen, 1995,
1997a & b), a directory of on-line museums, have been collected
from almost its inception. See Table 1 for the monthly visitor
figures since August 1994. As well as numbers, other information
can be gleaned automatically to some extent such as variation
of activity through the day and the location of visitors by country.
The VLmp visitor figures have steadily increased
year on year although the rate of increase is now reduced. Indeed
towards the end of 1998 there is an apparent decrease. This could
be for several reasons. The use of "proxy caches" by
browsers is on the increase for security and charging reasons;
thus these figures represent a lower bound since repeat visits
by other visitors using the same proxy cache are not detected.
A similar effect was apparent during 1995 when proxy caches were
first introduced. In addition, it appears that December is normally
quieter than most months, probably because many people reduce
their use of the Internet during the holiday period and interact
with real people instead.
Several surveys have been undertaken on-line using
the Virtual Library museums pages as an aid. One has surveyed
visitors to on-line museum sites using a questionnaire. This was
undertaken as an M.Sc. project at the University of Leicester,
UK as part of a Museums Studies course (Reynolds, 1997) and has
been summarised in an article available on-line (Futers, 1997).
Here we attempt to interpret some of the key results and, where
appropriate, how these impact on the provision of museum Web sites:
* "88% of visitors to museum Web pages
are based in North America."
Although around 59% of the world's Internet users
are based in the US and Canada (Internet Industry Almanac, 1998),
the high figure of 88% may be skewed by the fact that most North
Americans are native English speakers (the questionnaire was only
available in English). They may also be more willing to answer
on-line questionnaires due to familiarity with the technology,
the relative cheapness of telecommunications compared with the
rest of the world, and availability of leisure time to spend surfing
on-line. In any case, access to the Internet is becoming increasing
pervasive around the world (Press et al., 1998).
* "women make up 46% of museum virtual
visitors"
Overall, men still tend to outnumber women in the
use of the Internet, especially those making high use of it. In
the US, it is estimated that 78% of high-use Internet/Web users
are male (Hoffman, Kalsbeek & Novak, 1996). Thus it appears
that museum virtual visitors are much more balanced between the
sexes than is the norm for Internet users. Museums could attempt
to take this into account when design their Web sites.
* "the average age of people visiting
museum Web pages is 40 - 64
years of age."
The average age of the typical Internet user (in
the US at least) is 25 - 34 (Hoffman, Kalsbeek & Novak, 1996).
This the virtual museum visitor age seems to be skewed to an
older age group that is typical of Internet users in general.
The questionnaire would naturally tend to be answered by adults
rather than children. In the future, as schools go on-line, it
is likely that an increasing number of children will visit museum
Web sites under direction from school teachers, perhaps before
or after an actual visit to a museum. This could well bring the
average age of virtual museum visitors down in future.
* "74% of people expect to find on-line
exhibitions when visiting museum Web pages."
If a museum is planning to produce a Web site that
provides more than "brochure-ware" (the equivalent
of the printed advertising brochure issued by many museums and
providing brief information to attract visitors), it is well worth
considering some form of on-line exhibition. This could be a presentation
of the best objects available in the museum or perhaps a record
of temporary exhibitions as they occur, that can be left as a
permanent record long after the physical exhibition has been dispersed,
as at the Museum of History of Science in Oxford (Bowen, Bennett
& Johnson, 1998). Certainly any second-generation museum Web
site should include some form of on-line exhibition area.
* "87% expect images and - perhaps a museum's
greatest nightmare when going on-line -
52% of users expect to download images from a museum's Web page."
A museum Web site with no images of objects is normally
a disappointment to virtual visitors and most will move on quickly
if there are no images on offer. Although it is possible to make
extremely high-quality images available on-line like the Museum
of History of Science in Oxford (Sphæra 1997), it is probably
better in most cases to make lower quality images available on-line,
both to decrease loading times and to make high-quality printing
of the images impossible. A screen is typically an order of magnitude
worse quality than what is expected on paper and the eye appears
to adjust for this loss of quality on the screen, but not when
the same image is printed.
Perhaps a legitimate use of images would be for school
children to create electronic scrapbooks for project work collected
from a number of on-line museum sources, for example. In any case,
it is well worth including the museum's policy on images prominently
on the Web site. The site could attract commercial interest from
people such as publishers and authors willing to pay for use of
high-quality images in books, etc. Thus the Web site images should
be seen as a promotional vehicle for what the museum has to offer,
with increasing potential to raise revenue in the future.
The top three benefits of accessing information about
museums through the Internet were found to be as follows:
* "to explore a personal interest"
Special-interest museums (e.g., associated with particular
hobbies, sports, etc.) may especially benefit for an on-line site.
* "to learn about a museum not in your
locality"
A significant number of people (around half) are
interested in finding out about non-local museums. Of course many
of these people are unlikely to visit the physical museum, but
some may be planning a trip to the locality of the museum, and
the rest will have the knowledge of the existence of the museum
reinforced in their memory. Virtual visitors are much more likely
to make an actual visit to a museum at some point in the future
when they happen to be in the vicinity (e.g., on holiday) if they
have found an interesting Web site associated with the museum
beforehand.
* "it's fun and interesting"
To attract on-line visitors, museums will increasingly
have to provide interesting multimedia material within their Web
sites, similar to "interactives" than can be found in
many physical galleries. Indeed, in the future some parts of exhibitions
could be accessible both within the galleries and on-line, using
the "write once, run anywhere" Java programming language
for example (Singhal & Nguyen, 1998).
What constitutes an "interesting" Web site
changes with the availability of new facilities on Web browsers,
and must always be balanced against the browsers being used by
the majority of a museums visitors at any given time and the speed
of loading of multimedia content. Most users would like to be
able to traverse navigation pages in a few seconds and are likely
to lose interest if a Web page takes more that half a minute to
load. The "Virtual Endeavour" exhibit at the Natural
History Museum (Bowen, Bennett & Johnson 1998) would be impractical
on-line in the form presented at the museum itself since the cost
of the hardware required is too high for an individual to afford.
However some simpler virtual reality models are available on-line
for viewing with an appropriate "plug-in" program.
How do people hear about museum Internet sites? By
far the most import two ways that virtual visitors find museum
Web sites are as follows:
* "the majority of museum Web pages are
found through links from other pages"
Thus museum Web sites should be linked both from
widely-used on-line Web search engines (e.g., AltaVista under
http://www.altavista.com/)
and directories (e.g., Yahoo under http://www.yahoo.com/).
To ensure this, museum should expect to spend some time registering
their site with major search engines on-line and information related
sites of their existence. It is a good idea to do this again if
there is a major overhaul of a Web site, since then newly added
Web pages will be included. The use of the HTML <META
…>
tag to include metadata such as relevant keywords and a short
description of each Web page is good practice and normally helpful
for better processing and categorization by many search engines.
A page of links to other related sites and museums
is well worthwhile in a museum Web site, perhaps under a reciprocal
arrangement. Most people visit more than one site when using the
Web and thus providing many entry points and exit points is a
good idea.
* "many museum web pages are found by
chance"
Very few museum Web site are found through electronic
mailing lists or newsgroups. This is probably as much to do with
the fact that most museums do not greatly use or understand such
facilities. A specialist museum would find it well worthwhile
issuing period newsletter (e.g., press releases) on a relevant
mailing list and/or newsgroup to raise its profile worldwide at
very little cost. The "comp.infosystems.www.announce"
newsgroup is a good place to announce new museum Web site; once
issued on this or other newsgroups, a Web site is more likely
to be indexed by search engines and other sites. For an excellent
Web interface to newsgroups with good searching facilities, see
Dejanews under: http://www.dejanews.com/
Another survey has been undertaken more recently
from Japan of museums sites themselves linked from the Virtual
Library museums pages (Internet Museum, 1998). 206 answers were
obtained from 986 sites targeted (representing a 20.1% success
rate) covering 26 countries. The following questions were asked:
28.8% have 20 pages or less (which may be deemed
to be "brochure-ware"), but the mean number is 50 -
100 pages, which represents a fair sized Web site. 16.1% have
500 pages or more which represents a very large site. These sites
have embraced the technology very seriously and most of them have
probably been through at least one major reorganization of their
site.
One point to remember when updating a Web site is
that search engine "robots" will scan your site periodically
and record the location of all pages that can be found via internal
hyperlinks. If the internal structure of you Web site is radically
changed and previously existing URLs (Universal Resource Locators)
become invalid, many people who try to access your site via search
engines may receive a not very helpful error message on their
attempted entry into your site. If URLs must be removed from a
museum Web site, it is best to ensure that accessible invalid
pages gives a helpful response, perhaps guiding the visitor to
a number of good starting points within your Web site. It is even
better to plan the hierarchical structure and layout of a Web
site with great care and with an eye to its future maintenance.
Then existing URLs can remain in place and any radical restructuring
can involve adding new URLs and updating existing URLs rather
than deleting them. It is worth ensuring that important internal
pages on a Web site have short and memorable URLs that are not
changed without good reason. Then external Web sites can easily
and reliably link to these locations.
27.3% of museums update their home page once a month.
9.0% update on a daily basis and 9.0% update annually. Web sites
can become dated quickly, especially if ephemeral (but useful)
information such as entrance times, prices, temporary exhibition
details, etc., is included. Monthly is probably a good aim for
most museums, but larger museums should consider performing updates
more often than this.
57.1% of museums have only one person working on
their home page and only 3.0% have more than 5 people involved.
It is well worth having more than one person involved if possible
so that no single person is critical to its operation and success.
6.3% have no-one involved and thus rarely if ever update their
Web site.
Not including personnel expenses, 70.2% spend less
than US $1,000 per year. Only 9.8% spend more than $5,000. Thus
Web pages are still not a high priority for most museums. This
is not unreasonable considering that the majority of museums are
small in size, but any national or international museum should
already be in the top 9.8% above.
53.7% have been open for 1 to 3 years. 20.4% are
less than a year old and only 2.9% are 5 or more years old. The
useful lifetime of much computer equipment before it requires
significant upgrading is around three years and the same can probably
be said for Web sites. Museums with Web sites around two years
old should be think about the possibility of a major overhaul
to their site.
24.9% of museums own there own server which is quite
a high percentage. These museums are taking the Internet seriously.
For University museums this is easy and cheap because the Internet
connection is typically available 24 hours a day anyway and no
modem is involved; for other museums the communications cost can
prove prohibitive except perhaps in the US. Second-generation
Web sites should certainly consider the possibility of a dedicated
Web server if communication costs can be covered and suitable
computer support staff are available on-site.
43.7% receive under 50 visits per day, but 10.7%
receive over 1,000 each day, which is an excellent number comparable
to a reasonable-sized museum. 8.3% gave no answer and presumably
do not have the statistic available. Most museums would like to
know their real and virtual visitor numbers if possible, if only
for marketing reasons. Owning your own Web server makes these
statistics easy to collect automatically. Some Internet Service
Providers will make log files available to customers, but it is
worth checking if this facility is available. Second-generation
museum Web sites should certainly be collecting and using automatically
collected statistics.
34.6% replied "yes" which is a high percentage.
This may be because those taking the Web seriously enough to attempt
selling on-line are more likely to respond to an email questionnaire.
It is still not financially worthwhile in general for an individual
museum to provide its own on-line shop with full on-line credit
card transaction facilities. Most museums (in the UK at least)
do not even have an associated trading company (Carrington, 1999;
MGC, 1999). In any case, designing an on-line store requires special
consideration of the customer interface; a good design can increase
the amount of traffic and sales significantly (Lohse & Spiller,
1998). The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have a full
on-line secure shopping Web server (http://shop.metmuseum.org/)
but this is very much the exception rather than the rule. A sensible
alternative is to use an existing on-line shopping facility. For
example, MuseumShop@Home (http://www.museumshop.com/)
specializes in selling museum merchandise. Alternatively, Yahoo
provides more generic on-line shopping facilities that are relatively
easy to set up even for an individual (see under: http://shopping.yahoo.com/).
79.5% receive less than ten emails a day which is
not a high burden. Only 1.0% receive more than 100 emails each
day. At this level the handling of email becomes a significant
resource problem that must be addressed and budgeted appropriately.
Second-generation Web sites should allow virtual visitors to communicate
with the museum via email. It is worth having a prominent and
easily-found contacts page with one or more email addresses. A
problem of providing email addresses on a Web site is the increased
amount of unwanted "spam" emails as the address is discovered
by automatic "robots" traversing Web sites to create
junk email lists (Cranor & LaMacchia 1997). However this is
a generic problem with no good general solution as yet, although
newer email software increasingly includes facilities to help
filter incoming email. One solution which helps is to periodically
change the contact email address given on the Web site (say at
each major renovation of the Web site every two or three years).
52.5% state that museum collection and exhibition
information is most important. This ties in with expectations
by virtual visitors in the Reynolds survey, where 74% of people
expected to find on-line exhibitions when visiting a museum Web
site (Futers, 1997). 14.6% considered museum schedule information
most important.
33.7% said "yes", many stating that special
pages are provided for children. Web sites will increasingly have
to consider profiles of users, such as their age, to ensure that
interest is maintained and users revisit the site. Such information
is helpful in deciding how much effort to put into different resources
offered on-line. For example, a museum could consider the various
type of virtual visitor that may access its site. These could
be encouraged to visit different areas of the Web site using suitable
links on the main home page. Broad types of visitor relevant to
museums include, for example, enthusiasts (especially relevant
to specialist museums), children, researchers, teachers, tourists,
etc. For an example of where this approach has been taken, see
the home page of the River & Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames,
UK which opened in August 1998 (URL: http://www.rrm.co.uk/).
The most popular reason was public relations (39.0%),
followed by educational use (27.3%) and the obligation of the
museum to share its resources (17.6%).
Receiving information from customers (1.5%) and selling
museum goods (0.5%) were very low on the list of priorities, although
these are likely to become more important is the number of people
with on-line access increases and appropriate secure technology
for on-line transactions become more widely available and accepted.
High-value and reasonably small-size and low-weight items are
the most likely to be most successful when selling on-line. (Witness
the success of book and CD sales on-line.)
52.2% said the home page was important and 25.9%
that it was very important. Of course, this is a small percentage
of museums overall. Worldwide, most museums still have no associated
Web site.
Of most interest was collection information (in line
with the question in Figure 10 above), but educational, general,
activity and schedule information were not far behind. Database
information was also of significant interest although most museums
do not make their databases available on-line. There are security
issues of course (e.g., the location of expensive items and names
of donors who wish to remain anonymous) and also technological
issues (interfacing to the database can be difficult, although
modern databases make this increasingly easy). A further issue
is the quality of the information in the database and this is
often a very real reason for reticence by many museums.
This survey should be seen in the context of the
total number of museums in the world against the number than have
their own Web site. The percentage is still low (perhaps a few
percent) and the scope for expansion is great. Near all museums
of national or international status have their own Web site, but
there are many thousands of small museums worldwide where the
cost of setting up and more importantly maintaining a Web site
is hard to justify on financial grounds. Free and low cost Web
site hosting is becoming increasingly available, but the major
cost is the preparation of Web pages rather than their provision
on-line. Professionally produced Web pages can cost up to US
$1,000 per page if production and editorial standards are to be
of similar quality to paper publications.
This paper has considered the results of two on-line
museum surveys, one aimed at museum Web site visitors and the
other aimed at maintainers of museum Web sites linked from the
Virtual Library museums pages, in the context of updating existing
museum Web sites. Once a museum Web site is established, it is
good practice to put in place procedures and a budget for the
maintenance of the site. A major reappraisal of the role of the
Web site in the context of the museums activities overall is probably
appropriate every two to three years. Certainly to establish a
Web site and then to ignore its maintenance is both unprofessional
and potentially misleading to visitors as the information dates.
To access the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp)
directory on the World Wide Web, use the following Universal Resource
Locator (URL):
The "contacts" will probably be of special
interest to museum professionals, and includes links relating
to the museum surveys covered in this paper. The author welcomes
information about other on-line museum surveys. Please send brief
details and a URL to J.P.Bowen@reading.ac.uk
for possible inclusion.
Thank you to all those who have helped develop the
Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), especially Cary Karp
of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Thanks are due
to Rachel Reynolds (University of Leicester, UK) and Katherine
Futers (MDA, UK) for information on the virtual visitor survey.
Special thanks are due to Shinjiro Oono (Internet Museum, Japan)
for the results of the museum Web site survey undertaken in conjunction
with the Virtual Library museums pages. In particular, the graphical
results presented above were originally produced as part of this
survey. Minor amendments have been made for inclusion in this
paper.
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Author's vita:
Jonathan Bowen is a lecturer at the Department of
Computer Science, University of Reading where he leads the Formal
Methods and Software Engineering Group. Previously he was a senior
researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. He has
worked in the field of computing in both industry and academia
since 1977. His interests include formal methods, safety-critical
systems, the Z notation, provably correct systems, rapid prototyping
using logic programming, decompilation, hardware compilation,
software/hardware co-design and on-line museums. He holds an MA
degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University.
Bowen won the 1994 IEE Charles Babbage Premium award
and managed the ESPRIT ProCoS-WG Working Group of 25 European
partners (1993-1997) on Provably Correct Systems. He has produced
over a hundred publications and seven books. He has served on
numerous programme committees and is the Chairman of the Z User
Group. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM.
In 1997 he was honorary chair, workshop presenter and invited
speaker at the 1st Museums and the Web Conference (MW97,
Los Angeles, USA). He was a workshop and paper presenter at the
2nd Museums and the Web Conference (MW98, Toronto,
Canada) and is a programme committee member, workshop presenter
and session chair at the 3rd Museums and the Web Conference
(MW99, New Orleans, USA).
Contact details:
Jonathan Bowen
The University of Reading, Department of Computer Science
Whiteknights, PO Box 225, Reading, Berks RG6 6AY, England.
Tel: +44-118-931-6544 (direct) -8611 (enquiries)
Fax: +44-118-975-1994
Email: J.P.Bowen@reading.ac.uk
URL: http://www.cs.reading.ac.uk/people/jpb/