Publishing Electronic Exhibition Catalogs on the World Wide Web

Christie Stephenson

With the appearance of NCSA Mosaic as a client, the World Wide Web has become a viable medium for electronic art publishing. This paper will demonstrate the effectiveness of the Web as a platform for publishing art exhibition records that would otherwise go unpublished.

The paper includes a tutorial element, examining the steps in the process of producing such a catalog:

1. making basic organisational decisions on how to present the existing text
2. adding HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) markup to the ASCII text supplied by the museum
3. scanning the images, creating JPEG and GIF image files
4. creating appropriate links using URLs (Universal Resource Locators) and
5. testing and fine tuning.

Particular emphasis is given to the decision making process in converting scanned images to inlined GIFs and linked JPEGS, to capture significant image information while ensuring that network transmission times are within acceptable limits. Some attention will be given to the drawbacks of HTML as a markup language, and the problems related to its multiple functions as a scheme indicating both content and formatting instructions. Design issues are considered and the appearance of the catalog using the various Mosaic clients (X-Windows, Macintosh, and MS-Windows) are compared.