Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

A Theatre Collection on the World Wide Web

Maria Teresa Iovinelli

Biblioteca e Raccolta Teatrale del Burcardo, Rome, Italy

Winds of Change - New Technology

21st International Congress

Helsinki, 31 August - 6 September 1996

The World Wide Web project, started by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), is a distributed hypermedia system. Usually, Web documents are written in HTLM, a simple mark-up language used to create hypertext documents. It describes the structure of the document and lets us include images and other multimedia objects in it.

A few years ago, it was impossible to imagine the proliferation of multimedia content on the Internet we are presently facing. Slow connections made it inconceivable to send images or sound files, so heavy in terms of bytes, to final users equipped with 9600 bps modems. Then many kinds of software have been developed, compressing images and sounds to reasonable dimensions. Advanced browsers like Cello, Mosaic, HotJava, Netscape etc. have become available for free, allowing the users to interact with information servers to search databases, provide feedback or contribute resources. The World Wide Web has soon become the first attraction of the Internet.

Maintaining a visible presence on the Internet has become a compulsion for many organisations and individuals. They have set up so-called "home pages" on their own servers or on space leased from commercial service providers, to reach the huge public of Web users. Our Theatre Collection is on the World Wide Web since January 1996. We had not planned to take such an ambitious step, we just took a lucky opportunity when it arose.

During the last two years, the Comune di Roma, our municipality, has been developing a new information system according to the new mayor’s watchword of transparency. Our City Network has three major aims: giving information about public and commercial services available in Rome to the world-wide Internet community; creating new spaces for knowledge and democracy by giving every citizen the opportunity to access the network either from home, or from libraries and information points in every town district office; supporting experimental projects for the development of advanced services, the so-called terziario avanzato.

Many pages of the Comune website are devoted to culture: you can find programmes of theatres like the Teatro di Roma and the Teatro dell'Opera, calendars of concerts, exhibitions and other cultural events, lists of libraries and museums, with opening hours and other useful information.

At the beginning of the year, I contacted Mrs Claudia Pantanetti, the editor of the cultural pages, to update the information about our library and theatre collection. The results of these contacts exceeded all my expectations. She was willing to host our pages on the Comune server, and asked us for other available information, texts and pictures. I sent her a text file I had written for a publication the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers was printing to advertise its services. With little amendments, it is the same text you can still read on our pages.

Recently, we have selected some photographs of significant objects from our collection to be digitised and included in our pages. We have not yet a professional scanner, but a new synergy is setting up between our Theatre Collection, the Comune di Roma and the CASPUR, the Centre for SuperCalculus Applications (Consorzio per le Applicazioni di Supercalcolo per Universitࠥ Ricerca). The CASPUR will digitise our photographs, and we will choose the best images among their proofs.

We are not planning to build a "virtual museum", at present. To be considered a "virtual museum," a site should be much more than an advertisement designed to attract physical visitors into the "real" museum. It should offer artworks, texts and information; the electronic visitor should become a real visitor, taking pleasure and benefit from the virtual visit.

There are a number of museums and art galleries on the Web with original artworks of all kinds, from traditional visual techniques to electronic graphics and multimedia objects. A museum page may also contain biographies of the artists and hyperlinks to other art resources on the Web. Yet, we are still living in the childhood of the digital era. We can already visit a few "walk-in" galleries, which employ three-dimensional effects to let the visitor move into other rooms and "approach" the pictures. These effects, which are similar to those obtained by using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), are still very slow for web users equipped with 14,400 bps modems.

Although there are plenty of pictures and other artworks on the Internet today, available for the free personal use of the viewer, the idea of Cybermuseums as free unlimited hypertextual archives is not yet a reality. In addition to the puristic reluctance to put images of priceless works of art online, where they can be retrieved and manipulated with impunity, the concern about the unlawful appropriation of artist's works for commercial purposes is well-founded. The protection given by existing copyright laws face to these new forms of infringement is still inadequate.

When I started to explore the subject of museum websites, I had not thoroughly realised the magnitude of the copyright problems related to the contents of electronic documents. This paper cannot deal with these problems in an extensive way, but a mention is necessary. The Getty Museum, for instance, has recently started the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, which is trying to find solutions to the problems related to the technical and legal aspects of intellectual property rights with respect to digital images and their distribution over computer networks. Material on copyright problems related to the use of text, sound and visual documents on the Internet in general, and specifically on the World Wide Web, is available online at various sites: the Copyright FAQ, the Copyright Website, etc.

Web page publishing is very similar to traditional publishing. Though it might seem easy to write HTML files and to store them on Web servers, it is not so easy to create Web pages that are really appreciated and understood, and easily found by the intended readers. We should carefully design the contents, structure, and logical layout of our pages. The better solution, of course, would be asking for professional help, but our limited budgets often compel us to become editors and designers.

For a start, we can study what other people have done. After all, theatre museums are similar to other art museums, and we can learn much from their pages. There are some useful mega-lists of museum pages on the Web, as well as the common search engines (Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista etc.)

In my experience, I have learned two simple truths:

1. Simplicity is better than pretentiousness. We have little control on how our documents will look when displayed by various browsers, so we should rather focus on the contents than waste too much time in giving the information a special appearance.
2. Good work never ends. We often need to change the structure of our document when our page is already on the Web. We often need to add information, update the links to other documents, and improve the appearance of our page. We should not worry about giving partial information: incomplete information is better than nothing, provided that we warn the reader about the incompleteness of our page. "Work in progress" and "Under construction" banners are usual on Web pages.

We can include images and other multimedia objects in our documents, but we should remember that not all web-users have graphical clients, and many web users voluntarily turn graphics off to save downloading time, as I often do. Therefore, we should always make sure our document looks good in a text-based browser as well as in graphical browsers.

We should also take advantage of the knowledge we have acquired of our visitors’ expectations. Web users who will access our page, look possibly like our traditional public. Sometimes they are aware visitors, with a real interest in theatre history, but we should remember that a number of oblivious netsurfers will probably browse our page, so we should not take too many things for granted when designing our Web page. It can be useful to give some additional information, in order to attract more visitors. Additional information includes an English version of our pages, of course. I feel very frustrated when I come upon a page that looks so promising and yet so useless to me, because I cannot understand a word of its contents.

This experience has been very productive for me. It has forced me to deepen my knowledge of hypertextual documents. At present I am still a novice: it is not so easy to catch up with the newest performances of Netscape 2.0 and learn how to use Java applets. I know we have still a lot of work to do, to make the most of the possibilities the Web offers to museums and libraries. Just one year ago, the idea of having our theatre collection on the Web would have seemed science fiction to me; now I cannot guess where our further steps will lead us.

March, 1996

Addition, September 1998

The URL for the Burcardo Home Page is now: <http://www.theatrelibrary.org>

21st Congress

URL: http://www.sibmas.org/congresses/sibmas96/hels16.html