Museumland.comTM
The World-Wide Portal to Museums and Cultural Heritage

Mario Bucolo
ABIS Multimedia, Multimedialand Ltd.
Address: Via Milano n.61 – 95127 Catania – Italy
Phone: +39-095-387092
Fax: +39-095-387067
Email: bucolo@multimedialand.com
http://www.multimedialand.com
http://www.museumland.com

Museumland.com is the world-wide portal to online museums and cultural heritage. It contains the largest database in the world, with more then 6500 links from more then 110 nations.

Museumland.com is a vertical portal, that provides a new way for users to obtain information on museums.

Museumland.com is a point of reference for users all around the world who search for news and information related to cultural heritage, museums and galleries all around the world and their web sites.

The ambition of Museumland.com is to become the world-wide reference point for the museum and cultural heritage sector, as Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo - leaders in their sector.

The key point of Museumland.com is the opportunity to have a unique reference point for cultural heritage and museum. If anyone tries to search for a museum in "Altavista", he will find more than 6 million related web sites. "Yahoo" will search and give different results in number and categories list, "Exite" will return 226.595 hits (414.155 including galleries),"MSN" will return 368.614. These numbers do not consider all the possible translations of the word Museum, for example MUSEO in Italian. The targeted advantage of using Museumland as a unique gateway to the museums, galleries and cultural heritage contents, information and news is therefore clear, the “one stop-shop”. This is the key benefit for the user, he can find what he want, easily and fast. And due to dedicated marketing and services agreement the user can find any related service to the items searched as an added benefit. For the museums there is the opportunity to have more visibility on the net and to have more means to have direct contact with their users/visitors and to increase the number of visitors to their web sites. Museumland.com was created to fill the gap between museums and Internet users.

In Museumland.com it is possible to find all types of online museums, from history museums to Art museums, from Automobile to War museums and so on. Here are some categories of online Museums: Archaeological, Artistic, Ethnological, Scientific – Technological, Religious, Historic, Music, Nature, Children Museums, War, Gallery, Photographic and Virtual Museum. About Cultural Heritage, in Museumland.com we also include related institutions/organisations such as: Libraries, Monument, Gardens, Churches, Cathedrals, Abbies, Castles, Zoos, Parks, Planetaria, Collection of Regalia, Famous people’s house etc.

www.museumland.com is a vertical portal, that provides a new way for the user to obtain information. It is a ‘B2C’ Portal or, rather, a ‘M2C’ Museums to Consumer! In Museumland.com there is a section dedicated to the business aspect of Museum and Cultural Heritage market (B2B). E-commerce will be present soon, in the form of special agreement with merchandising departments of many museums.

We have recently announced that Museumland.com will host a micro web site for museums that are not on-line, so that they can have visibility on the Internet (acting as ‘incubator’). This opportunity will be free of charge offer. Also, other services will be available soon to museums.

The Museumland initiative is managed by Mr. Mario Bucolo and is promoted within the context of the Medici Framework of Co-operation of European Commission, DGXIII (no financial support). The technical department is in Italy by ABIS Multimedia, marketing and editorial staff is based in London at Multimedialand Ltd. The famous two bronze statues of Riace (licensed by Italian Cultural Heritage Ministry) are the official mascots of Museumland.com.

Now Museumland.com is on the way to establish international partnership. There are agreements for open country mirrors of Museumland.com in Japan, French, UK, Russia, Hungary, Portugal, Ireland, Argentina.

Mario Bucolo - 32 years old, entrepreneurs, 17 years experience on computer graphics, 14 years on multimedia applications. He own ABIS Multicom, based in Catania - Italy and Multimedialand Ltd, based in London. He is teacher of Ethnomedia too and author of many papers presented in international congress. He has been project leader of multimedia applications for many different Point of Information systems, especially designed for museums, cultural heritage, tourism and retail sectors. He is particularly skilled in human-computer interfaces.

Museumland.com is updated daily with new links from every nation in the world. By the end of 2000, we expect 10.000 museums to be accessible.