CAS harnassed a great deal of scientific information and resources when building the VSMC. They united thousands of experts in the subject areas and the young IT technical staffs, took CSTNet as the platform, applied Web multimedia technology and constructed the virtual museums---VSMC (http://www.kepu.net.cn ), and became a forerunner in China in applying the advanced network media technology to carry out scientific propagation.
These virtual museums have been constructed by experts applying the first-grade network multimedia technologies facing the future internet freeway and have become a popular and unique resource on the Internet for providing excellent popular science content. The 320,000+ of daily page hits at the virtual museums, both domestic and international, indicate the broad appeal the virtual museum concept has with the public.
VSMC has been unceasingly researching the science popularity theories and the concerned network application technologies, and it has also been keeping its leading position in this project technology.
At the same time, VSMC attached importance to the cooperation with schools and all kinds of formal/informal educational institutions. It promoted communication on practical experiences of science education, and thus established a science popularization information resources network with the most abundant contents in China.
Moreover, it viewed the construction of English version of VSMC as an opportunity to develop international cooperation toward the goal of establishing an international science alliance network to promote the sharing and common construction of science resources, as well as to promote the trans-cultural understanding and communication.
Additonally, VSMC is working with Texas A&M on the construction of “China-US Virtual Science Center”. To date, the two institutions have comprehensively developed the high-level international cooperation in sharing and commonly constructing a Sino-U.S. network for popular science resources, science educational platform and scientific research platform, and will play a very important role in pushing forward VSMC to the whole world. 
Science Museums of China
In 1999, internet users were looking for science and technical information, but there was a serious shortage of Chinese on-line content in those areas. The Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences applied the technical advantages accumulated in the process of researching and applying the next-generation Internet technologies toward the creation of the Virtual Science Museum network of China.
After five years of development and construction, now VSMC has grown from 4 virtual museums to 60. Additionally, VSMC now includes the simplified Chinese version, traditional Chinese version and an English version. The website formed its own vivid characteristics with the contents structure form of “virtual museums basing on web”.
VSMC provides the public with access to many horizontal subjects such as:
Since the beginning, VSMC has been paid attention to building international and domestic cooperation in very wide area. Inside the country, the project group based on the self-owned resources of CAS, made development and innovation, scanned widely across the wide resource market inside and outside China, developed the resource cooperation construction together with:
After five years of efforts, by active and effective cooperation and communication, VSMC has accomplished a great deal toward its goals of sharing resources, the common construction of information and the technical communication, and establishing long-term and stable cooperative partnerships with many institutions. VSMC's partners include Liberty Science Center in New Jersy, U.S., Exploratorium in San Francisco, Chabot Space & Science Center, Texas A&M university, and a famous American TV program production institution for children---Sesame Workshop, etc.
At present, VSMC has reached an exciting agreement with the Sesame Workshop toward the development of shared programming. The first-step cooperation, which is broadcasting the program of Sesame Workshop “I Love Science” to the Internet users via the platform of VSMC, has gone into the actual operative phase with the sketching of a delegation agreement, a cost evaluation, program filtration and other works.
The main cooperative partners and target viewers of VSMC are all covered in GLORIAD.
1. The technical level
The server of Beijing site of VSMC website is placed in the main computer room of CSTNet, and provides the external service of 365*24 for free. With the universal application of media technologies in the succeeding construction of virtual museums and the planned application development of Virtual public observatory, Remote cameras, Virtual field trips, Computer simulations and 3D visualization, etc, and the successive on-line services, it has put forward higher requirement to the width of network band, the stability of data transmission and the safety verification system. GLORIAD will provide guarantee for the realization of these requirement.
2. The tactics level
The main nodes of GLORIAD has developed the information service and technical service concerned with scientific education to different extents in their own works, and have common interests in applying high-speed network in the construction and services of science education information. And this kind of cooperation of the member nodes has unique role for promoting the mutual comprehension and trans-cultural and trans-regional international cooperation; the cooperation in this aspect can precede the cooperation in the science researching area and explore experiences for the cooperation in the science researching area.
We suggest GLORIAD to establish a special working group, coordinate in integration, and do the following jobs at various nodes:
VSMC has got support from NSF as follows.
1. From March 14 to 27, 2001, the delegation of VSMC went to the United States for science popularization investigation funded by NSF (NSF#00817417) and NSFC.
2. From September 1, 2003 to January, 2005, the Information Technology in Science-Center for Teaching and Learning (NSF#ESI-0083336) at Texas A&M University, takes the form of supplementary project of <China-U.S. cooperative research exchange: Planning Visit to Increase US-China Cooperation in Science Education: Integrating science, education and IT in a cross-cultural setting>, develops the cooperative project with Computer Network Information Center of CAS and Texas A&M university as the main partners, including the participation of concerned science popularization and researching institutions in the two countries, combining the discussion of information technology and science popularization technology, and with developing Sino-U.S. comparable science popularization contents and researching science popularization theories as the theme. In the cooperative project lasting for 1.5 years, the Chinese and U.S. parties will look on three specific themes (botany, animal behavior science and scene ecology), take the form of projects, organize the both parties’ counterpart scientists, professional figures, teaching staffs to commonly study and research how to rationally make use of the concerned information technology for science popularization education, commonly develop interactive Sino-U.S comparable science popularization contents with good tribute forms, apply them in the daily teaching work and carry out science popularization propagation via Internet, and thus make good preparation for the deeper-level Sino-U.S. science popularization education, cooperation and research and the sharing and common construction of science popularization resources in the future.
3. From June 10 to August 15, 2004, funded by NSF-funded East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes, two postgraduate students of Texas A&M University will come to the Computer Network Information Center to join the project work of VSMC.
