Resumen
In this article, the authors focus on digital access to antiquities and the direct path to original sources. First-rate management of source material and other intellectual property is more difficult and controversial than anticipated. Information protection is crucial. Progress toward improved access is expected to open pathways to deliberate and inadvertent abuse of privileges granted. Making images and text available via the Web and on CD-ROMs is easy; doing so in a way that preserves and enhances critical values is not, particularly when libraries need to make the new services pay for themselves rather than rely on subsidies. Protection needed for intellectual property is often constructed narrowly as copyright privileges. The digitized manuscripts and images should reflect not only the artist's values but the reader's privacy and the owner's confidentiality. Collection curators have varying usage policies, from restrictive to permissive, but all want their holdings to be tastefully represented. For fine arts and manuscripts, quality of representation in digital image distributions is as important to the curators as aspects more commonly considered intellectual property rights.

Resumen
Russia's palatial state Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg possesses many great collections including prehistoric art, antiquities, Western European art, and numismatics. This article reports the joint efforts of software company IBM Corp. and Hermitage, who began exploring the nature of museum information services that would best serve the museum, in 1997. Three end-user applications were identified for development , that would permit the Hermitage's collections to be searched and better experienced from afar. The multimedia based education programs were created to serve Hermitage visitors, especially children by providing interactive art education. The visitor information kiosks were created to help Hermitage visitors choose a set of holdings to visit and then navigate the museum in order to see them. The web site was created to serve remote patrons by familiarizing them with the Hermitage's holdings, its history, news, temporary exhibitions, and the visitors service it provides. The digital library enables the browsing and searching provided by the site. It generates dynamic pages for specifying browsing and search, execute the search, and prepares dynamic pages that presents the search results.