'Guiding' the World to Canada's Museums: the yellow brick road or the straight and narrow?

Over two years after launching The Guide to Canadian Museums and Galleries, the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) initiated the redesign of this collaborative, online resource dedicated to promoting Canadian museums. This project involved more than a simple facelift. It was about interdisciplinary research to define the user interface redesign tasks to transform the Guide into a significantly more functional, comprehensive, evolving and intuitive resource for the growing range of today's web users. It was also about investigating the new opportunities offered by the WWW to increase the visibility of Canadian cultural institutions; testing and creating contexts for partnerships; and about offering incentives to enhance collaboration. This paper will examine how the research on developing a collaborative service in a dynamic environment impacted the application architecture and interface.