Limited physical space has historically constrained the presentation of collections. In response, museums, libraries and other collection holders are forced to limit the size and growth of their collections or to store items off-site. Meanwhile, developments in computer technology present new challenges and opportunities for educators and collection holders. The popular World Wide Web, for example, has become an important source for information seekers, while traditional information providers remain hesitant to publish or index their materials on the Web. The upshot is that education suffers because quality information is not organized, integrated and delivered through channels habitually followed by today's users, young and old.

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon propose to develop, document and disseminate prototypes for a new form of collaboration between libraries, museums and other collection holders. This partnership will mitigate the problems caused by physical space constraints and result in a more effective educational outreach to the public in the form of "Smart Web Exhibits" (SWE) designed to deliver information online, on target and on time to a diverse user community.

Two SWE will be developed from signature collections in Carnegie Mellon University Archives and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The library SWE will enable users to search photographs, correspondence, lecture notes and published and un-published papers of two early innovators in computer science: Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. The museum SWE will focus on text and images documenting the discovery of dinosaurs currently house in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The SWE will achieve three goals. First, Web-accessible, high-quality, high-value content will be delivered and preserved over time. Second, the project will generate the organizational model and authoring, indexing and usage analysis tools that add value to content and can be re-used with other multimedia collections. Third, research will be conducted and disseminated in human factors, electronic commerce, digital imaging, and the collaboration of museums and libraries in the service of education. The superior content and methods for locating and navigating information provided by SWE will address the legitimate concerns educators have about the Web. The SWE will offer access to materials never before presented as an integrated collection, while at the same time advancing the standards in image quality, content descriptions and system management plans for preserving and maintaining digital files.

Project activities include selecting, organizing and digitizing the content; developing the user interfaces; conducting a reflectometry study to produce accurate renderings of the artifacts; designing the underlying database and infrastructure; creating new video tutorials; developing the tool set; assembling the prototypes; conducting usability testing; and documenting and disseminating what was done and learned in the project. The SWE project will produce detailed reports and tools that will enable other museums and libraries to assess the technology and build their own SWE more cost effectively while maintaining local control of the content and presentation of their digital collections.

The library and museum SWE will be published on the Web and maintained after the completion of the initial project. They will provide innovative and coherent models for organizing, presenting and navigating multimedia collections on the Web. The SWE design will use the Web to achieve digital preservation goals, expand the audience for collections, and dovetail the information delivered to the user's level of interest and available time.