Abstract
The Museum Informatics Project (MIP) at the University of California in Berkeley was formally established in 1992 as a collaborative effort to coordinate the application of information technology in the more than 80 museum and other organized, non-book collections on the campus. The Project's goal is to broaden access to fundamental academic resources by scholars, students, and the public. Faculty, collections managers, curators, librarians and information technology specialists work together to develop data models, system architectures, demonstration systems and network-accessible production databases of text records, images, sound, video and film. MIP is collaborating with similar projects at Harvard, Cornell, MIT, USC, the Australian National Botanical Gardens and other institutions.Some of the considerable early successes and difficult problems of the Project and its predecessor activities are examined to show how the necessary political, administrative, financial and technical support for MIP was created within the institution so that a change effort of this magnitude could be initiated.