Several museums in North Portugal agreed to join efforts to promote their activities among local communities, using interactive and multimedia technologies under the project GEIRA. Traditional Web approaches provide a general purpose environment to describe the main goals and activities of the museums together with some form of a catalogue containing the more relevant art objects in the museums. This approach requires a move towards a more aggressive appeal to invite (young) net surfers to enjoy repeated visits to the same museum site. Curators know how to attract the public to their museums; similar techniques are being applied to the Web, with further refinements.

A short presentation of some of these techniques and how they are being designed and implemented in North Portugal is the main topic of this communication; it includes the use of temporary exhibitions - 3D virtualization of real ones, virtual-only exhibitions, tales of objects, animated guided tours - through a theme, through space, through the time - and educational outreaches - school teacher's guides according to the age levels, pre- and post-quizzes, video clips on the Web showing the children reactions during the previous visit, room for the children to creatively express, and share on the Web, their feelings and ideas.