Victoria manages all of its museums centrally, whereas Sydney's large museums are managed by separate organizations, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and the Australian Museum Trust. Hart saw the larger responsibility as a welcome challenge and now says that moving to Victoria - "where all the eggs are in one basket" - has taught him a great deal about leveraging the benefits of scale.

And it is a pretty sizeable scale: Museums Victoria is a $60 million operation. Since opening, however, the museum has been dogged by visitor and budget slumps, meaning that like many CIOs Hart has had to learn how to do more with less. "The toughest part of my job is juggling the resources," he says. "Seeing all these things that are possible, but knowing that our capability to do them is finite.

"Historically, technology has not always played a big part in museums, so it's really important to have people strategically placed throughout the organization who can speak both languages," he says. "I often find myself being an interpreter between the museum-ology and what's possible."

Museum Victoria is an organization of approximately 650 staff, just under 500 full-time, that help look after the needs of the one million people that visit Victoria's museums each year. Hart is responsible for some 750 desktops, spread over four main sites. One-third of those desktops are public access terminals, complete with all the extra support and security issues that attend machines that are manhandled all day long, and on days like today, by thousands of sticky little fingers.

In addition to the Melbourne Museum, Hart is also responsible for the Scienceworks Museum in Spotswood, which features the state's Planetarium (recently upgraded to a full digital sky), the Immigration Museum in downtown Melbourne and a huge offsite storage facility, which stores much of Museum Victoria's 16-million item collection of artefacts and biological specimens. What's more, because Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building is located next door in the Carlton Gardens complex, the World Heritage-listed building falls under Hart's purview as well.

Hart is also responsible for the Museum's records management group (the library), all associated Web sites and multimedia displays (most exhibitions are now designed and fabricated in-house at a facility located in the Scienceworks Museum), as well as two Discovery Centres, which serve as access centres for members of the public who have strange flora or fauna, or any other item of socio-historical interest that needs to be identified by experts.

"Our core business is being a museum, and the business bottom line is very important," Hart says. "Within my division you have the IT department, which has a business analysis unit in it which is all about making HR, finance, ticketing and all those systems more efficient and more effective and better value for money. It's a public organization and it's important that we spend our money wisely."

There is also a creative element to Hart's role, one that is somewhat unusual for a CIO. He is also in charge of the Special Projects Unit, which means that he has a free hand to develop new ways of presenting multimedia to the visitors.

"Doing the R&D for the whole museum's use of technology is a creative role that most CIOs don't have," he says, "and it's something that I hold very dear."

The most recent example of Hart's work in this area is the Virtual Room, a pioneering new 3-D technology for museums developed here in Australia. The technology grew out of the University of Swinburne's astrophysics department, where academics there were looking for new ways to create 3-D models of galaxies. The idea was then funded by the Victorian Government's Science, Technology and Innovation initiative to the tune of $3.3 million over three years, and a consortium of partners, including RMIT, Swinburne, Monash University and the University of Melbourne along with Adacel Technologies, was established to bring it to the market.

The Virtual Room itself is an octagonal chamber that consists of eight projection screens, each measuring 180 centimetres diagonally. Different perspectives of the same computer-generated scene are projected onto each screen, with the result being that visitors can walk around and look in at the virtual scene from different angles. A 3-D effect is created by using two projectors per screen to cast two slightly different viewpoints. Special glasses with differently polarized lenses are used to create the illusion of depth. Exhibitions in the Virtual Room at Melbourne Museum currently include the human brain, Phar Lap, dinosaurs and real-world 3-D panoramas of the ancient temple complex at Angkor Wat.

"3-D is great for museums, but the gear is expensive and you're usually limited to no more than five people at a time," Hart says. "The difference with Virtual Room is you can have 100 people watching it at once."