urators.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, the role of education became increasingly prominent at major American museums, not eclipsing the curator's role but often becoming the most visible and public feature of museum exhibition and administration. The educational mission of museums has enlarged in a track parallel to the development of computer technology. All of the major and many of the minor museums in the United States and the United Kingdom have Internet sites that provide varying degrees of viewer access and supporting research to so-called "virtual collections" that may not be on exhibit in the museum venue; the need for reliable scholarship from educators in a variety of disciplines touching on a museum's art and artifacts may be inferred. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has undertaken a digitization project for museum materials as well as development of guidelines for academic use of such media at colleges (Giral & Dixon, 1996). The Getty is also involved in developing museum education as an academic discipline and as a feature of cooperation between museums and schools (Williams, 1997).
To chart the shift of attention in museum culture from the curator's to the educator's domain, a useful 27-page monograph is Gallup's (1976) recitation of a curator's administrative and technical responsibilities, which in general precedes the shift in question and which reflects traditional lines of thought about museums as elitist, aesthetic venues. The same is true of what appears to be one of the few attempts to reduce theory and practice of museum education to a textbook (Newsom & Silver, 1978). As Rice (1995) points out when citing the book, it appeared at the very time the roles of museum educators and curators were being radically rethought. Technical tips for curators engaged in preservation and restoration can be found in Bellardo's (1992) discussion of paper archives and Gunner's (1984) discussion of b...