Abstract

The online museum has been defined since its early days as a place devoid of spatial references. However, institutional communication and content mediation in museum websites is commonly linked to the museum’s physical space. This connection produces a mismatch due to a lack of correlation between the physical museum’s topology and the Net hypermedia system. Consequently, access to museographic online information is mostly laid out in taxonomic structures, typical of gallery cataloguing systems, rather than syntagmatic structures, inherent to online exploration. Furthermore, the profusion of online references to the museum’s architectural structure help to consolidate the museum’s physical space as a model for the online discourse, as well as to restore the museum’s building as an identity symbol, a value blurred by virtuality.