The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (VMP) is a Rich Internet Application with a Web Services architecture used to manage and navigate 400 objects from the Australian Museum’s (http://www.austmus.gov.au/) Pacific Island collections. This project tests a new means of facilitating access for Indigenous people and researchers to museum-based digital collections whose artefacts are physically distributed and often not on public display. The project has two dimensions: at the technical level the focus is on leveraging metadata used in curatorial management to produce a Web-based content management system for representing collection resources as a dynamic associative network; at a museological level the focus is on studying the effective means of presenting and interacting with this semantic network for traditional owners, the general public, researchers and curators (link)